“French President Emmanuel Macron went full Orwell this week. While long the darling of Western media, Macron has been one of the most anti-free-speech leaders in the world. This week, he declared that ‘The so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.’ Having Emmanuel Macron holding forth on free speech is akin to Joey Chestnut proselytizing on veganism. France has been in a headlong plunge into censorship and speech criminalization. These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to ‘inciting’ or ‘intimidating’ others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments in a Paris bar. In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority ‘smelly’.” (10/07/26)
“Faced with one of the biggest and fastest changes in human health, we’re treating the results as a condition that needs lifelong medication. The newest drugs are very effective, and that’s important to recognize. Semaglutide and tirzepatide have led to weight loss that older nonsurgical treatments rarely matched. Semaglutide has also reduced the risk of major heart problems in people with overweight or obesity and heart disease who didn’t have diabetes. Tirzepatide has greatly improved sleep apnea in people with obesity. These results are significant, and these drugs are much more than cosmetic weight-loss aids. That’s why we need to look closely at what’s happening now. The problem isn’t that these drugs don’t work; they clearly do. The real concern is that they might work so well that we stop asking why so many people need them in the first place.” (10/07/26)
“Henry VIII was a nationalist in that he chafed at England’s being made to answer, to the degree it was obliged to do so, to the original European union—the elite, transnational, Continental bureaucracy known as the Catholic Church …. But Henry’s protean nationalism meant the same thing as the ersatz nationalism of today’s nat-pop right in the United States—for the executive, I get to do what I want, and for his apologists, We get paid. … Henry’s court was practically an Olympus compared to Donald Trump’s circle of imbeciles and moral midgets … but the Tudor entourage had its Steve Witkoffs and Jared Kushners, too, a pillaging aristocracy all too happy to profit from policy, using the seizure of church property and church funds to enrich itself.” (10/07/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“No one cares. They used to, but then Israel spent three years showing the world why October 7 happened in the first place. After witnessing the cruelty and savagery of the state of Israel, people get it now. Everyone understands. After Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the morning of October 7, there was an outpouring of love and sympathy for Israel from around the entire world. Every major landmark from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Empire State Building were illuminated blue and white in solidarity with the Israeli people. … Anyone who hadn’t been following the Israel-Palestine issue very closely was on Israel’s side that day. And then the bombs started dropping. And dropping. And dropping. And dropping.” (10/07/26)
“Treasury Secy Scott Bessent clearly endeavors to be the second Pete Hegseth of Trump World, albeit via packing heat in the form of economic missiles rather than the kinetic kind. In fact, however, his ballyhooed Operation Economic Outcast actually amounts to the greatest windmill tilting operations since Don Quixote himself. So let’s cut to the chase right up front. To wit, Bessent’s premise that he can switch-off Iran’s military payroll and bring the regime to its knees by driving its oil exports to zero is wholly delusionary. The former (regime collapse) does not remotely follow from the latter (oil exports at zero), which for all practical purposes has already happened. So herein we endeavor to explain why cutting off Iran’s oil exports isn’t any kind of war-winning silver bullet at all.” (10/07/26)
“The concept of innocence shows up often in international law, and in recent weeks, a growing number of countries have rallied to defend it – in the narrowest part of the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The waterway links Europe and Asia, helping ships avoid a long route around Africa. An expanding war to keep the strait open and safe for commercial ships (a historic right known as ‘innocent passage’) has now gone global, especially after Iran closed the nearby Strait of Hormuz in its war with the United States. Together, the two vital sea-lanes have served as a transit point for more than a quarter of seaborne petroleum. Recent violations of these ‘innocent’ waterways, embedded in rules for the freedom of navigation, have raised prices at the pump everywhere, even in oil-rich North America.” (10/07/26)
“His re-election prospects are threatened as recent investigations detail alerts from abroad in the days and weeks before the 2023 Hamas attack.” (10/07/26)
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
by Michael Waldman
“One of the most potent midterm election slogans was offered by the Republicans in 1946: ‘HAD ENOUGH?’ The GOP swept into power after years of New Deal dominance. We like to say that what counts is not what you are against, but what you are for. Not always, though. Sometimes ‘Had enough?’ is enough. Midterm elections often are waged as a rebuke to the party in control of the White House. Political scientists call this a thermostatic election. Voters adjust the temperature by turning the dial away from perceived overreaches. Sometimes the floor just drops out from under a political party. This could be a year when ‘Had enough?’ is enough. But at times candidates have an agenda, detailed or implicit. Those are the years that produce the biggest change.” (10/07/26)
“An ordinary person can earn a paycheque, pay her taxes, cover living costs and mortgage payments, and perhaps even add to her savings — and at the end of the day she will still owe most of her mortgage. This is a normal state of affairs, and nobody finds it puzzling. Yet when a company reports profits alongside large amounts of debt, the reaction is often to question whether it’s really making money. After all, if a company is ‘truly’ profitable, why is it in debt? The short answer is that debt is not the opposite of profit. Loss is the opposite of profit. This imagined contradiction is easier to resolve once we recognize that profit is a flow and debt is a stock.” (10/07/26)
“After Tennessee unsuccessfully tried to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance whisked her to a Nashville hospital, where the condemned murderer became a patient in urgent need of lifesaving care. Should Pike recover from two botched administrations of pentobarbital, which left her unconscious and unable to breathe on her own, she might travel that road in reverse after she is well enough to be killed. That bizarre episode illustrates the perverse consequences of trying to disguise the brutal reality of capital punishment by dressing it in medical garb. Although most Americans say murderers like Pike should be executed, the method they prefer suggests they are squeamish about admitting what that entails.” (10/07/26)
