Annual Fundraiser: Momentum, If You’ll Help Maintain It

HUGE THANKS to subscribing contributor MB and supporters JM and RW! They weighed in yesterday with a whopping $470, bringing our annual fundraiser total (as of 5am) to $755.50!

Caveat: I’m awaiting final confirmation from the donor on $100 which may require a refund due to error, but either way a REALLY great day for the fundraiser and we’re either just past or quickly approaching the 25% mark toward our goal of $5,503 (once we’ve raised $2,751.50, supporter GL will “match funds” for the other half)!

In other words, we need to raise somewhere around $2,000 more … and once we’ve hit our goal, you won’t hear from me about money at all for the rest of the year, or very much until NEXT October. So …

PLEASE SUPPORT THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT’S DAILY NEWSPAPER!

https://news.rationalreview.com/support-rrnd

… and have a great day!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily

The implications of designer babies

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie

“Sequencing the first genome cost billions. Now it costs less than a weekend in Paris. IVF went from miracle to mainstream in a generation. Pioneers pay, then prices plummet. The real threat to fairness is the ban, not the bill. Prohibit it in Britain and only those who can fly to Singapore will benefit. Prohibition creates precisely the privilege it pretends to prevent. … Better babies will mean a more worthwhile world. Since we can’t stop it, we might as well embrace it.” (10/14/26)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-implications-of-designer-babies

Nobel Peace Prize has become a fig leaf for left-wing activism

Source: Fox News
by Daniel Schatz

“Alfred Nobel intended the peace prize for those who had done the most to advance peace among nations. Instead, it is increasingly handed out to the international activist class: people who say the right things, back the right causes and appeal to the political instincts of a handful of parliamentarians in a rarefied progressive bubble. This year’s award to Navi Pillay is a case in point. Pillay is best known for chairing the U.N. commission of inquiry that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Her selection will inevitably be read as an endorsement of a U.N. culture in which hostility to Israel is not a liability but a badge of moral seriousness. But there is more to Pillay’s record than the commission’s fixation on Israel.” (10/14/26)

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/nobel-peace-prize-has-become-fig-leaf-left-wing-activism

BLS: US inflation rose to 3.7 percent in September

Source: The Hill

“Inflation rose slightly in September after holding steady the month prior, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed Wednesday. The consumer price index (CPI) increased 0.6 percent last month and was up 3.7 percent relative to September 2025. That marked an increase from August, when annual inflation sat at 3.4 percent. The popular inflation metric was expected to rise by 0.5 percent in September and increase slightly to 3.6 percent year over year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s ‘Nowcast’ projected on Tuesday. Gas prices, which rose 9.1 percent in September, accounted for more than half of the monthly increase in inflation, according to the BLS.” (10/14/26)

https://thehill.com/business/6146675-bls-september-cpi-data-inflation/

America Is Making Its Own Problems Worse

Source: The Bulwark
by Mark Hertling

“For months, Ukraine has conducted an increasingly effective deep-strike campaign against Russian refineries and energy infrastructure. Russia’s energy industry helps fund Putin’s war, and its refineries supply fuel needed for military operations. Ukrainian strikes have imposed economic and logistical costs on Moscow, forcing Russia to divert resources to protecting facilities far from the front lines while also affecting Putin’s efforts in pursuing his war aims. Yet Washington is now planning to provide Moscow with additional revenue as the invasion approaches its fifth winter. American lawmakers understand the need to starve Russia’s military capabilities, as they have sought to increase economic pressure on Putin through additional sanctions legislation passed last month—yet President Trump is ignoring the very law that he signed.” (10/14/26)

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/america-is-making-its-own-problems-worse

Livestreaming an Execution Is a Bad Idea

Source: The American Conservative
by Scott Greer

“[Pete] Hegseth assumes the American public is the same as it was in the 19th century. Back then, hangings served as community entertainment. But we live in a different age now, and the people don’t want to have the government broadcast such acts of violence to households across the country. The purpose of such a move is ostensibly to sate the public’s appetite for justice. But all it will do is repel them.” (10/14/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/livestreaming-an-execution-is-a-bad-idea/

Using AI Instead Of Writing Turns Your Brain Into Cheez Whiz

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“Today I saw a post from a popular Twitter account saying, ‘As soon as AI is good enough to write blog posts in my voice as good as I would have written them, i intend to use AI to do so. I know what I want to say, and I could say so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor the words out one by one.’ ‘I kinda hate writing,’ she said further down in the thread. This sucks. I don’t like what we’re becoming. I don’t like how AI is making us so dumb so quickly that the simple act of writing is already being described as ‘manual laboring the words out one by one’, like it’s some superhuman feat of exertion that nobody should be expected to be capable of.” (10/14/26)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/10/14/using-ai-instead-of-writing-turns-your-brain-into-cheez-whiz/

Doctors: Pope Leo is eating and recovering after cancer surgery

Source: Associated Press

“Pope Leo XIV was eating regularly Wednesday and began walking and doing respiratory exercises, and his tests are normal following surgery to remove a cancerous mass from his lung, the Vatican said. Leo’s two doctors, Dr. Luigi Carbone and thoracic surgeon Dr. Stefano Margaritora, provided a medical update on Wednesday. Initial blood tests and a chest x-ray confirmed a normal recovery, they said. … Tuesday’s surgery showed the 71-year-old pope has the most common type of lung cancer, known as lung adenocarcinoma. Experts said further tests are needed to know if the disease has spread and if more treatment is needed, but those results weren’t available on Wednesday.” (10/14/26)

https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-leo-surgery-lung-cancer-08a4aca4e5a6002a1cb9a4ca1ba372cc

War Is An Instrument of Globalism

Source: Libertarian Institute
by Thorsten Polleit

“Unfortunately, the probability rises with every passing day that NATO will wage war with Russia. The proxy war, openly fought since February 24, 2022 between Russia and Ukraine and which has lasted longer than World War I, may soon become an open war between Russia and the West. The ideology of globalism dominates the corridors of European governments, and war is among the means that adherents in Berlin, London, Paris and Brussels are quite willing to use in order to reach their goals.” (10/14/26)

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/war-is-an-instrument-of-globalism

The Moral Bankruptcy of Livestreaming An Execution

Source: Persuasion
by Kevin Carroll

“Since 9/11, U.S. intelligence personnel—from analysts and law enforcement agents to interrogators and case officers—have often endured a grisly task: studying execution videos filmed by al-Qaeda or the Islamic State to positively identify the executioners. I was one such intelligence official. In 2006, I downloaded a photograph of a man killed with a headshot by a naval Special Mission Unit and showed it to every source of mine in Iraq. I needed to determine if the deceased was al-Qaeda’s emir for western al-Anbar, a terrorist who killed a young Marine lieutenant friend of mine.” (10/14/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-moral-bankruptcy-of-livestreaming