“I need six pillows to sleep comfortably. Two under my side, two between my legs, one against my back, and one to hug. That’s too many pillows to pack …. Fortunately, Walmart doesn’t just make obtaining pillows convenient throughout the United States. It makes it dirt cheap. Every Walmart I’ve visited has the same $3.44 pillow for sale, so I routinely buy them wherever I go, and just abandon them when I leave. I’ve done this over and over, yet only on my last trip to Wyoming did I reach a profound economic epiphany. I have bought Walmart pillows in dense urban areas. I have bought them in suburbs. I have bought them in rural areas. And the price is always $3.44… plus tax. … Which has a shocking implication: The degree of local competition has absolutely no effect on the price of the pillow.” (10/29/26)
“Cairo buys an increasing amount of fuel from abroad, owes billions to foreign lenders, and depends on open Red Sea-Suez traffic, among other pressures.” (10/29/26)
“A new project by The Intercept reveals the hundreds of candidates still taking the pro-Israel lobby’s cash, and how AIPAC is obscuring its spending.” (10/29/26)
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms, and you don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms, and the boosters and pundits certainly don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But something is going to happen in the midterms. And what happens in the midterms will make them either the most important midterms in the history of ever, or the least important. It all depends. Which means you shouldn’t take a chance, and you should get out there and vote all red just in case.” (10/29/26)
“Obama and Clinton, for their parts, have waited until midterm elections voting has begun and the outcome — a potential blue wave — seems clear. The likelihood of an electoral repudiation of Trump and his party is thanks not to their efforts, but to the voters themselves. Organically, a leaderless protest movement of sorts has taken shape, uniting Democrats, independents and a good number of repelled Republicans. Trump calls MAGA a movement, and it is. But he’s the unwitting organizer of this countermovement as well, thanks to his sorry record of self-aggrandizement, cruelty and a needless war that broke both his no-wars campaign promise and the one about bringing down Americans’ cost of living. (Moody’s Analytics recently reported that the Iran war has cost the average U.S. family more than $2,000.)” (10/29/260
“In international media, PM Netanyahu’s adversary Gadi Eizenkot has been portrayed as a centrist voice. That’s part of his track-record. But he is also the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that decimated Gaza.” (10/29/26)
“A New Mexico geothermal project used AI to reduce surface infrastructure costs by 75 percent and speed up drilling by 35 percent.” (for publication 11/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“[E]ven as Washington seeks to navigate its fraught but improving relationship with Beijing, these meetings represent a strengthening of its network of partnerships intended to counter Chinese influence. While the Quad and Squad are two distinct components of that effort, there is little doubt that Washington’s expanding regional security commitments will do nothing to make Americans safer and will rather serve only to draw them further into a potentially catastrophic great-power confrontation.” (10/29/26)
“Designed to dwarf even the Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe after World War II, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first unveiled by President Xi Jinping in a 2013 speech at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Beijing later pledged to invest US$1 trillion, and by some estimates as much as $8 trillion, in roads, railways, bridges, ports and other infrastructure projects around the world, with an emphasis on sparking economic development in the underfinanced Global South. Originally called One Belt, One Road, the BRI was meant to usher in what Xi described in his speech as a more just world order. But on many counts, the program has not measured up to its original, world-changing ambition.” (10/29/26)
