“Under international humanitarian law, as most noticeably enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, ‘Civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict must be respected and protected as long as they are not taking a direct part in hostilities.’ (emphasis added). The State of Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law. As far as they are concerned, everyone who works for a media outlet that is, in any way, aligned with the military wing of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other militant faction in Gaza, is a terrorist, and can be targeted and killed, and anyone who works as a journalist but has previously had any suspected involvement with any of these military factions in any kind of capacity can also be targeted and killed.” (10/26/26)
“Philadelphia parents noticed troubling signs in their children’s social studies curriculum and asked to see all the materials. They couldn’t get them. Now those materials have been brought to light in a congressional investigation. A new majority staff report from the House Education and Workforce Committee documents how a small group of school personnel turned Philadelphia’s social studies curriculum into a political platform for extremist causes. When those parents approached my organization, the North American Values Institute (NAVI), asking for help, we tried to find out what the district was teaching but we also hit a wall. Eventually, a teacher shared the curriculum with us with considerable trepidation. She asked that we protect her anonymity. That alone should give us pause: A teacher feared sharing public school instructional materials with people seeking to understand what children were learning.” (10/26/26)
“In addition to illegally usurping congressional power over taxation, the Trump trade war against Canada damages our economy and poisons relations with a key ally. Courts should strike it down, just as they did with the IEEPA tariffs and the more recent Section 122 tariffs. They should also invalidated the massive Section 301 ‘forced labor’ tariffs, which have been challenged in three cases currently before the US Court of International Trade.” (10/25/26)
“Asked at the White House whether he would sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen, Donald Trump steered the conversation from Ukraine to warheads. ‘We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,’ he said. Russia, he added, ‘has been fine on Ukraine.’ In the same exchange he suggested it was time for someone other than Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate for Kyiv. Two proposals now ride on one invitation.” (10/26/26)
“The American grindhouse has long been a playground for fomenting radical notions among thrill seeking proles with a few bucks to spare and a taste for something right to the point. The high-brow critics call this exploitation cinema and wag their bony fingers at such fare for indulging in spectacle and bad taste and they aren’t totally wrong. The problem is that modern late-capitalist civilization has reduced us all to a slumbering horde of flesh-eating zombies and the spectacle of ‘bad taste’ or transgressing our prescribed bourgeoise sensibilities is the only thing that will ever wake us. I know because it has before and not that long ago. The neon bathed grindhouses of pre-Giuliani Time Square achieved this goal with a rash of garish subcultural revolutions while Godard sold out and every new wave became assimilated into Spielbergian Hollywood dreck.” (10/25/26)
“Much like the phrase ‘will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,’ the phrase ‘we’re taking our country back’ is an interesting one for its implications. It presupposes 1) there is a group collectively understood as ‘we’; 2) this group once had possession of the United States; 3) this group no longer has possession of the United States; 4) because it was taken away by another group; and 5) it must be taken back. This is all interesting stuff for sure, especially when one considers that the ‘we’ implicit in the phrase is, if you interrogate it long enough, white people—specifically white Christian people, specifically white Christian men, specifically wealthy white Christian men. Especially when one considers that this group, as a matter of political and institutional reality, is the most over-represented, over-coddled, over-defended, and over-privileged group in the nation, maybe in human history. ” (10/25/26)
“The media coverage of the contest between incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, is in one respect surprising. That a mayoral contest, which may result in Bass’s ouster, in America’s second-largest metropolis has drawn widespread coverage is no surprise, particularly since Raman’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America appears to make the election one more test of the extent of socialism’s rise, particularly in urban America. But that the coverage has often focused on the internal divisions within DSA between those locals that prioritize the kinds of mass outreach inherent in electoral politics, and other locals and the organization’s national committee, which have a more sectarian focus on ideological purity, is indeed surprising, at least in publications that hardly qualify as ‘left’. ” (10/26/26)
“For years, people experiencing serious health problems due to Covid vaccination have asked for something fundamental: rigorous scientific investigation into what happened to them, why it happened, and what might help. Many have spent years seeking answers through a fragmented healthcare system, encountering clinicians unfamiliar with their symptoms, struggling to access appropriate evaluation, and trying to find researchers willing to investigate their conditions. Now, the National Institutes of Health has announced a dedicated research effort intended to investigate health problems following vaccination and infection.” (10/25/26)
“If you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven’t been for quite some time. This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you? When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes?” (10/24/26)
“Few military figures come off quite so quotable as Confederate cavalry general (and Ku Klux Klan founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest, who said of winning battles, ‘I always make it a rule to get there first with the most men.’ That, of course, also constitutes the conventional rule for winning elections: Get there first (by motivating mail and ‘early’ voters as well as election day voters) with the most votes. … Republicans usually, but not always, get more credit for trying to suppress the Democrat vote than for trying to get out the Republican vote. As this year’s midterm elections approach, that tactic looks a lot like another Nathan Bedford Forrest aphorism. … ‘Whenever you see anything blue, shoot at it, and do all you can to keep up the scare.'” (10/25/26)
