“For months, Ukraine has conducted an increasingly effective deep-strike campaign against Russian refineries and energy infrastructure. Russia’s energy industry helps fund Putin’s war, and its refineries supply fuel needed for military operations. Ukrainian strikes have imposed economic and logistical costs on Moscow, forcing Russia to divert resources to protecting facilities far from the front lines while also affecting Putin’s efforts in pursuing his war aims. Yet Washington is now planning to provide Moscow with additional revenue as the invasion approaches its fifth winter. American lawmakers understand the need to starve Russia’s military capabilities, as they have sought to increase economic pressure on Putin through additional sanctions legislation passed last month—yet President Trump is ignoring the very law that he signed.” (10/14/26)
“[Pete] Hegseth assumes the American public is the same as it was in the 19th century. Back then, hangings served as community entertainment. But we live in a different age now, and the people don’t want to have the government broadcast such acts of violence to households across the country. The purpose of such a move is ostensibly to sate the public’s appetite for justice. But all it will do is repel them.” (10/14/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Today I saw a post from a popular Twitter account saying, ‘As soon as AI is good enough to write blog posts in my voice as good as I would have written them, i intend to use AI to do so. I know what I want to say, and I could say so much more if I didn’t need to manual labor the words out one by one.’ ‘I kinda hate writing,’ she said further down in the thread. This sucks. I don’t like what we’re becoming. I don’t like how AI is making us so dumb so quickly that the simple act of writing is already being described as ‘manual laboring the words out one by one’, like it’s some superhuman feat of exertion that nobody should be expected to be capable of.” (10/14/26)
“Unfortunately, the probability rises with every passing day that NATO will wage war with Russia. The proxy war, openly fought since February 24, 2022 between Russia and Ukraine and which has lasted longer than World War I, may soon become an open war between Russia and the West. The ideology of globalism dominates the corridors of European governments, and war is among the means that adherents in Berlin, London, Paris and Brussels are quite willing to use in order to reach their goals.” (10/14/26)
“Since 9/11, U.S. intelligence personnel—from analysts and law enforcement agents to interrogators and case officers—have often endured a grisly task: studying execution videos filmed by al-Qaeda or the Islamic State to positively identify the executioners. I was one such intelligence official. In 2006, I downloaded a photograph of a man killed with a headshot by a naval Special Mission Unit and showed it to every source of mine in Iraq. I needed to determine if the deceased was al-Qaeda’s emir for western al-Anbar, a terrorist who killed a young Marine lieutenant friend of mine.” (10/14/26)
“In 2021, I reported on my national television program, Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson that the largest Amish community in the US, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had rejected masking, vaccines, isolation, testing, and all the other CDC recommendations for Covid…and apparently fared none the worse for having done so. … This attention to the Amish approach and its apparent success obviously didn’t please public health officials and industry advocates who were heavily pushing different narratives. They wanted the public to believe that anyone who wasn’t socially distancing, staying home, getting vaccinated, shutting down the works, and taking government-favored prescription drugs were putting themselves and others in grave danger.” (10/14/26)
“GM’s production cuts and layoffs show why factories, equipment, and workers cannot adjust overnight. Industrial policy can leave lasting economic costs.” (10/14/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Ninos P Malek
“In a free market, businesses must satisfy customers to earn profits. Persistent losses can signal that resources would be better used elsewhere. Rather than rescuing failing firms with taxpayer money, the free-market perspective is to allow the market process to work. As I sometimes jokingly tell my students when explaining this principle, it’s time to say, ‘Bye-bye, die-die!’ to businesses that fail to satisfy consumer needs. (Figuratively speaking, of course.) Some call government favoritism crony capitalism. I dislike that expression because it still associates the problem with capitalism.” [editor’s note: Free markets and capitalism (“a mixed, state-regulated, industrial economy”) are opposites, and “crony capitalism” is a redundancy – TLK] (10/14/26)
“Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major case pitting privacy advocates against media companies. By any measure, Salazar v. Paramount Global is a blockbuster case in the making. At issue is the use of viewing habits by companies offering free subscriptions and material to the public. These companies make money by then using that history for tailored marketing programs. Michael Salazar is arguing that a Blockbuster-era law should prevent such sharing of his viewing history, a ruling that would have a massive impact on media and entertainment companies. Salazar involves a law passed 40 years ago after a controversy during the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.” (10/14/26)
“A mysteriously named political action committee has started running ads reminding voters in Colorado about that time GOP representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and her date were caught on camera in 2023 getting handsy during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice. That same PAC is producing a spot hitting Anthony Constantino, a Trumpist congressional candidate in upstate New York, because someone used his sticker-printing company to briefly make stickers that read, ‘Kill the Police.’ Attack ads are everywhere in the last month ahead of November’s election. But these spots are a little different. The semi-anonymous PAC that’s funding and making the ads, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, is a pro-solar-energy outfit.” (10/14/26)
