Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“I saw a clip going around from the Netflix series ‘1899’ where a woman discovers a crack in the screen of what she had taken to be her world, causing her entire understanding of reality to crumble before her eyes. Someone had captioned the clip, ‘Every awakening begins with a fracture in the lie.’ Yeah. It does tend to happen like that. You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it’s Palestine. You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you’ve been taught about your world was a lie. Every war. Everything about how your government really operates. Everything you’ve been told about nations and how they work.” (08/26/26)
“President Donald Trump has been threatening to yank the licenses of broadcasters who irk him since his first term. But this time around, the FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, Brendan Carr, seems eager to act on that vindictive impulse. Carr portrays the ABC review as a response to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs that may qualify as ‘unlawful discrimination.’ But he has made it clear that the FCC also is considering the broader question of whether ABC’s stations are serving ‘the public interest,’ a vague statutory mandate that he views as a license to override freedom of the press.” (08/26/26)
“In the 1999 movie ‘The Matrix’, Agent Smith hears a train approaching and delivers one of the iconic movie lines: ‘That is the sound of inevitability.’ America, listen closely. Our national debt just blew through $40 trillion, and unless Washington dramatically changes course, that train has another destination coming into view very quickly. $50 trillion. Yes, $50 trillion. But wait! There’s more! It could happen by 2030. Yes, by 2030. This isn’t a Republican problem. It isn’t a Democratic problem. It’s now an American math problem. The Congressional Budget Office projects a federal deficit of approximately $1.9 trillion in 2026. But that’s hardly the end of it. CBO projects deficits totaling more than $23 trillion from 2026 through 2035. Think about that.” (08/26/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe
“In total, the Trump family is estimated to have made over $2 billion since Trump returned to office. … It is understandable why most Americans find this upsetting, especially after Trump launched a war that predictably raised gas prices for a population already struggling with a years-long inflation crisis. … Trump is visibly using his power to make his own family richer while his policies leave most American families worse off. But the key word there is visibly. Because the truth is that, despite what establishment Trump critics want us to think, Trump did not bring this kind of ‘corruption’ to the White House; he’s just not trying as hard to hide it. This is what states do. And it’s what they have always done.” (08/26/26)
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
by Michael Waldman
“In November, we should be able to have elections that are free, fair, and secure. But it will take a lot of work between now and then. We saw that for sure this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know. Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to upend mail voting. That is the way 1 in 3 Americans vote. Trump purported to order the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver lawfully cast ballots unless the voter is on a list (which doesn’t exist yet) created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots. It’s absurd. And, no surprise, it’s illegal.” (08/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Stephen Weese
“You probably haven’t heard of too many examples of successful data center developments, and that’s partly because ‘something worked; everything is just fine’ is not a common news story. However, CNN recently reported on exactly that: Quincy, Washington, is home to over 30 data centers and has experienced an incredible boom as a result. The data centers now cover an estimated 57% of Quincy’s property tax revenue, funding a wave of public infrastructure projects: a $15 million aquatic center, a 143,000-square-foot indoor sports complex, a $120 million high school, a new hospital, library, police and fire stations, paved sidewalks, sewage systems, and a wastewater treatment plant. Residential electricity rates in the county rose 3.5% last year, while large industrial users, such as the data centers themselves, absorbed a 9.1% increase. The data centers there are paying for their own added infrastructure and generation costs rather than spreading those costs to households.” (08/26/26)
“Now the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI, threatening to strike you down in your healthy middle age unless you submit to the testing, treating (ie: medications and lifestyle changes), and a retesting paradigm which can lead many to become obsessed by the numbers. By the way, these four measures have one thing in common: They are typically treated with a prescribing pen that has been carefully guided in your doctor’s expert hands by the helpful people in the pharmaceutical industry. Just saying …” (08/26/26)
“The midterm election is a little more than two months away, and voters who spent the summer tuning out politics are beginning to pay attention. Campaign advertising is picking up, candidates are settling into their general-election messages, and the small number of voters who haven’t already chosen a side are starting to take a closer look at the people asking for their votes. They don’t particularly like what they see. Nearly two-thirds of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Trump’s approval rating remains underwater, Democrats hold a roughly 6-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, and Republicans are now defending Senate seats in states that shouldn’t be competitive.” (08/26/26)
“A series of crises have roiled Libya over the last month, undermining a U.S.-led initiative to resolve the country’s profound political predicament and open its markets to American investment. Violent protests over deteriorating living conditions have surged in western cities under the control of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, just as a series of drone strikes have hit energy and oil facilities in the city of Zawia, west of Tripoli. In the east near Benghazi, which is under the authority of strongman Khalifa Haftar, unknown assailants assassinated Major General Fawzi al-Mansouri, Haftar’s head of military intelligence. This chaotic stretch of events prompted the U.S. to belatedly recognize that the deteriorating security situation could undermine its peace initiative.” (08/26/26)
“In Breaking Bad, the character Walter White explains to a major drug dealer why cheaper knockoffs of his signature Blue Sky methamphetamine are just not enough: ‘So… it’s grade-school tee-ball vs. the New York Yankees. Yours is just some tepid… off-brand, generic cola. What I’m making is classic Coke.’ This week, James Carville released his own uncut, undiluted classic product to a nation of rage addicts. Blue Sky rage. What set off Carville was telling. He and others were outraged that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met with Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser Jared Kushner to discuss areas of common ground. Such dialogue ‘with the enemy’ is unthinkable in an ‘age of rage’, particularly for someone like Carville who previously threatened that, once Democrats are back in power, Trump supporters would be treated the same way as Nazi collaborators after World War II.” (08/26/26)
