Source: Fox News
by Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis (USA, ret.)
“The guns have gone quiet over Gaza — for now. After years of darkness, the region has entered a new phase shaped by President Donald Trump’s decisive leadership and the landmark 20‑point Gaza peace deal. Hostages have come home, Hamas has been driven underground, and an American‑backed peace architecture has emerged where fire once raged. For the first time in decades, Israelis and Arabs alike can glimpse something extraordinary: a path forward. Yet history reminds us that in the Middle East, every dawn carries both promise and peril. Which road will this new dawn take? 1) The golden horizon — prosperity through peace … 2) The Phoenix of Persia — Iran rises again … 3) The mirage of coexistence — Hamas rebrands and regroups … 40 The fragmented peace — a cold stability … 5. The renaissance scenario — a new Arab‑Israeli compact …” [editor’s note: I have listed the subtitles; click the link to read the arguments – SAT] (10/19/25)
“During a private meeting last week, Bari Weiss startled ’60 Minutes’ staffers by asking why Americans view the show as biased — another sign of the new CBS News chief’s aggressive approach to reshaping the network, according to a report. Weiss ‘surprised senior staff … when she asked a provocative question: Why does the country think you’re biased?’ the New York Times reported on Sunday, citing three people who attended the Midtown Manhattan session. The exchange was met with ‘stunned awkwardness,’ the paper said. The question came less than two weeks into Weiss’[s] tenure as editor in chief — and underscored the upheaval inside the nation’s most-watched newsmagazine as hundreds of CBS News employees gauge their new boss’s unorthodox style.” (10/20/25)
“President Donald Trump recently followed through on his threat to use the federal government shutdown as an occasion to fire government workers on a mass scale. Shutdowns are temporary, yet the effects of this one seem likely to be permanent. It’s a kind of limbo, a foretaste of the old government being phased out, but with little clue what might replace it. Such things have happened before in history. While imprisoned in 1930 for opposing Mussolini’s fascism, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ L.S. Stavrianos’[s] 1976 book The Promise of the Coming Dark Age now seems dated, but raises a provocative question for our time: Can something new and better evolve from these dark times?” (10/19/25)
“Across several national parks in the Sierra Nevada, researchers found that the populations of some bird species grew rapidly after fires and remained higher even decades later. Scientists already knew that some bird species could thrive in burn scars, dubbing them ‘post-fire specialists.’ But a new study, published Oct. 9 in the journal Fire Ecology, provided a rare look at the longer-term impacts of fires on a group of common bird species. The researchers only investigated low- to moderate-intensity burns, such as those associated with prescribed fire. Previous research suggests high-intensity megafires, fueled by climate change and fire suppression, can threaten birds. ‘It was really exciting to us to see how rapid and how enduring the response of birds was to these fires in these national parks,’ Chris Ray, a research ecologist for the Petaluma-based nonprofit, the Institute for Bird Populations, and the study’s lead author, told SFGATE.” (10/20/25)
“It’s hard to believe that 24 years after 9/11, New York City is on the brink of voting in a Uganda-born Islamist mayor who campaigned last week with an unindicted co-conspirator [sic] in the first World Trade Center terrorist attack that killed six New Yorkers. Three weeks before the election, polling says that the runaway front-runner, the perpetually smiling democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, 33, will be this city’s first Muslim mayor. And not just any Muslim, but an unapologetic Islamo-Marxist who appears to have been carefully constructed for electoral success in the same political laboratory as Barack Obama. Mamdani is so cocky that he boasted on social media about his Friday visit to radical Imam Siraj Wahhaj at his Bedford-Stuyvesant mosque, despite Wahhaj’s links to terrorists, and his openly homophobic rants.” [editor’s note: The supposed “link” is that some of the participants visited the mosque he runs. Additional evidence? Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada – TLK] (10/19/25)
“He won’t call himself a duke anymore, but that is not enough for many of Prince Andrew’s critics. Buckingham Palace and the British government were under pressure Monday to formally strip Prince Andrew of his princely title and sumptuous home after new revelations about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. After discussions with his elder brother King Charles III, Andrew agreed on Friday to stop using titles including Duke of York. … Andrew’s statement relinquishing some of his royal titles came after emails emerged showing he had remained in contact with Epstein longer than he previously admitted, and days before publication of a posthumous memoir by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleged she had sex with Andrew when she was 17.” (10/20/25)
“Susan Collins remains forever unconcerned. One of the Republicans’ most reliable meme generators isn’t fretting over Janet Mills’s entry into the race for Maine’s Senate seat. She has Graham Platner to thank for this moment of Zen. The oyster farmer and Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran turned the governor’s waltz into the race against Collins into a 2026 Democratic primary battle. Phenomenal crowds have shown up (eight months before the election) to hear from one of the most charismatic newcomers to surge into Maine politics in recent memory. While most Maine Democrats would rather see off Mills (who, should she win, would be 79 years old when she took office in 2027) into a comfortable retirement, they are more sanguine than national Democrats are about the development that pits two appealing candidates against each other.” [editor’s note: Collins is no prize, but putting Mills in that seat would be declaring my homeland state a complete disaster for all things liberty – SAT] (10/20/25)
“Now nine months into his second term, President Donald Trump may be setting a new norm in law enforcement. Under his watch, prosecutors in the U.S. Justice Department have indicted three people who Mr. Trump believes have done him wrong: former FBI Director James Comey, current New York Attorney General Letitia James, and, on Thursday, his former national security adviser, John Bolton. The courts may yet declare all three to be not guilty of charges against them. Yet the possibility of prosecutorial misconduct, such as for vindictiveness, has supercharged efforts to reset the norms of integrity (that is, pursuing justice over ‘winning’) that most prosecutors have honored for decades. For now, much of that norm-resetting is at the state level, where millions of felonies and misdemeanors are handled each year by more than 2,300 prosecutor’s offices.” (10/17/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Last year I banged out an angry rant about the way Israel supporters would yell ‘release the hostages!’ at anyone who talked about the latest massacre of Palestinian civilians, saying Hamas was to blame for the killing because of their refusal to release the Israeli captives, and that it would all stop once the hostages are free. I’m remembering that essay today because the hostages are free, but the massacres are continuing. On Friday Israel reportedly blew up a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family of eleven people, including seven children. The IDF gave its usual excuse for the massacre: the civilians were deemed to have crossed an invisible line into a forbidden zone which made the Israeli soldiers feel unsafe. They did this exact same thing constantly during the last ‘ceasefire’ as well.” (10/18/25)
“John Bolton has pleaded ‘not guilty’ on 18 counts of illegally hoarding or sending sensitive national-security information, charges that could bring decades in prison — and if the feds have the evidence they claim, the case seems open-and-shut. Figuring out where justice lies is a bit tougher. … Bolton, a former UN ambassador and national security adviser, has long been a friend of these pages. Yet if he truly used his AOL account to email classified info to his wife and daughter, they seemingly have him dead to rights. Thing is, the public doesn’t get to know what’s beneath ‘classified’ and ‘top secret’ labels — and over-classification is a notorious problem in Washington, as Jim Bovard noted in these pages when it was President Donald Trump in Team Biden’s crosshairs.” (10/17/25)
