THANK YOU to subscribing contributor T, whose $5 monthly payment yesterday broke our “zero-dollar day” streak! Our annual fundraiser total currently (as of 5am) stands at $1,058.
That’s $1,693.50 short of our $5,503 goal (once we’ve raised half, $2,751.50, supporter GL will “match funds” for the other half).
This year, I’ve tried to be a little less verbose in appealing to you for support, but I guess it’s time to thump the podium and yell a bit:
You already know the story! We’re coming up on 24 years as Rational Review News Digest, with another 11 years before that as Libernet and Freedom News Daily! We’re the Internet’s oldest daily news and commentary roundup for libertarians!
We’re solid, reliable, we get the job done for you, and we only come to you once per year with the “fundraising telethon” schtick!
Once we reach a fairly modest goal, we STFU about money entirely for the rest of the year and mostly for the first three quarters of the following year!
I’d love to STFU about money entirely for the next two months and mostly for nine more months after that! You’re in control of whether or not I get to!
Stop me before I exclaim again! Oh, no, too late!
And, of course, have a great day!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily
Source: CNN
“Scores of people have been killed and about 100 injured after a high-speed train collided with a stationary train. Spain’s transport minister called it ‘inexplicable’ that a train was allowed to continue its journey despite a red signal being in place. … This is the third rail disaster in Spain in 2026. In January, two high-speed trains collided near Adamuz, in southern Spain’s Córdoba province, killing more than 40 people. A commuter train near Barcelona derailed days later.” (10/28/26)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/28/world/live-news/spain-train-crash-collision-intl
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“The Real ‘Affordability Crisis’ – Created By Government.” (10/28/26)
https://x.com/RonPaul/status/2115473976642384014
Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan
“I’ve had many great arguments with ChatGPT. But it’s worrisome that I almost always win. Often, it concedes that my contrarian view is 100% write. At minimum, it asymptotes to conceding that I’m 70% right. Most people characterize this [a]s ‘sycophancy bias.’ But the problem is deeper. Like almost all human beings, AIs are bad Bayesians.” (10/28/26)
https://www.betonit.ai/p/chatgpt-knows-its-a-bad-bayesian
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“The truth is, as I laid out here earlier this year, that the war on Iran is not a drastic but necessary measure to thwart an imminent threat from a rogue regime. It’s just another military action, on top of all the others our government is carrying out, that is beneficial for a coalition of unique, well-connected interest groups—from the Israeli politicians who want to direct American power towards weakening their main regional rival to the domestic weapons companies getting paid to restock America’s dwindling munitions stockpiles.” (10/28/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/iran-midterms-and-myth-government-people
Source: The Next Move
by Jay Nordlinger
“Some Republican-aligned journalists said that they would be neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump. They would be neutral umpires, calling balls and strikes. Which sounds good—reasonable. But there were always problems with this approach. First, the umpires did not call every pitch. They were selective. Pitches that did not reflect well on Trump might not get called at all. Second, not all pitches are equal. The attempt to overturn an election is one pitch, I suppose. The deregulation of oil and gas, another. But you see how one thing crowds out—overwhelms—the other? This gets to the biggest problem with the balls-and-strikes approach: it may work with a normal politician, with a basic fitness for office and a basic respect for our constitutional order, but it cannot work with a Trump.” (10/28/26)
https://www.thenextmove.org/p/you-cant-ump-trump
Source: United Press International
“The U.S. military [murdered] five people in a ‘kinetic strike’ targeting a boat operating along what it called ‘established narco-trafficking routes’ in the Eastern Pacific on Tuesday, as a senior Pentagon official compared Latin American drug cartels to Al-Qaida and ISIS and accused them of orchestrating legal challenges to the military campaign. The strike is the 72nd known attack by the U.S. military on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since the launch of the operation in September 2025. In those strikes, it has [murdered] at least 243 people it alleges were involved in drug trafficking, though family members of some of the dead have said their loved ones were fishermen and farmers.” (10/27/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/10/28/SOUTHCOM-boat-strike/5591793158414/
Source: Pink Flame of Liberty
“A Midterm Trump Hissy Fit – US v. Alaska – Part One.” (10/28/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KF6G9BfNIA
Source: The Intercept
by Liliana Segure & Jordan Smith
“[Charles] McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. … There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth. … In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as ‘thin,’ Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself ‘is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies.’ … Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison. … Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out.” (10/28/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/10/28/bite-mark-forensics-junk-science-mccrory/
Source: New York Post
by Daniel Schatz
“Greta Thunberg recently traveled to France to applaud the protest movement. Wearing a black-and-white scarf associated with pro-Palestinian activism, she appeared outside a high school in a Paris suburb and lent her celebrity to demonstrations marred by rioting, arson and vandalism — with authorities already putting the damage at no less than $34 million. Thunberg brought the applause. Taxpayers were left to pay for the destruction. Her appearance fits a broader pattern of increasingly radical alliances and support for extremism. Before traveling to France, Thunberg had endorsed a motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’ adopted by Britain’s Green Party on Oct. 4. Her radical turn has been unfolding for years. Yet in progressive circles, she remains the Mother Teresa of the activist left — a secular saint whose moral authority is taken for granted and whose political judgment rarely faces scrutiny.” (10/28/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/greta-thunbergs-radical-turn-deserves-scrutiny-not-applause
Source: Fox News
“The Supreme Court, with no noted dissents, has allowed an agreement between Texas and the Department of Justice ending a Biden-era immigration rule to go into effect. The Biden administration adopted the rule in 2024, formally establishing procedures for immigration judges to temporarily pause certain deportation proceedings through a practice known as ‘administrative closure’, including when migrants were pursuing immigration relief through other federal proceedings. The Supreme Court’s move leaves in place a lower court ruling eliminating that rule, stripping away a procedure that allowed certain deportation cases to be put on hold. Texas sued the federal government in June, arguing that the rule was adopted without proper legal authority.” (10/28/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-unusual-legal-gambit-against-biden-era-deportation-rule-pays-off-supreme-court
