Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Tuesday, October 20, 2026

"The world should accept some bad things happening," Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, "for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency."

Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it's incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things.

Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections.

People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle.


Fasten Your Seatbelts 2026 could be the beginning of the end. Read more


The BBC has subpoenaed Jack Smith as part of Trump's $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the media company.


Trump is setting in motion a series of events to invalidate and coerce the outcome of the midterms. If he succeeds, the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.


Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a version of SpaceX's Starlink that Ukraine has relied on in its war against Russia, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter.

Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, last week "capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network," the Journal reported. The decision left some Ukrainian drones virtually inoperable, according to the newspaper.

Musk and President Donald Trump, who have both recently criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, discussed the move to throttle Starlink "soon after" the change first became public last week, two people told the Journal.

One of the people who spoke with the news outlet claimed that Musk discussed the matter with multiple senior Trump administration officials, including the president himself, prior to imposing the Starlink speed cap.


U.S. Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster said Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud,18, won't be released because he's a risk to the community and a flight risk, the Associated Press reported. During an almost two-year undercover investigation by the FBI, Mohamud traded messages with a confidential informant and paid $600 to an FBI employee posing as a member of ISIS for an AK-47 and 200 rounds of ammunition. He was arrested on Oct. 6 in a public park following the purchase.


Unfortunate News. Read more


"Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that," he said. "We should have a national wealth tax " it won't work by state because people will just move. And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100% at some level. I would pay them."


Monday, October 19, 2026

In the southeastern city of Lyon, a tourist office building was burned. Some storefronts along the shopping streets near Bordeaux's city hall were destroyed, and the goods inside appear to have been stolen, social media videos geolocated by NBC News showed. City halls in Marseille, Lille, and Angers were broken into, Interior Minister Laurent Nuez said Sunday, adding the arrests made had little to do with the student protests. Authorities had "lost control" in major cities, the interior minister conceded. He offered his resignation to Macron, who rejected it. Read more


Sunday, October 18, 2026

After seeing Michael Dell's wife Susan in the White House recently, I started wondering how far robotic technology may have come. This story is about a $150,000 dollar robot from AION. But who knows about the robots we aren't seeing. Imagine the robot a billionaire tech oligarch may already own. ..Or do we have to imagine anymore?...

And if not, what happened to the real Susan?


A group of men, calling themselves the SB244 Compliance Crew, have organized to protest a new Kansas law that requires people to use public restrooms that align with the biological sex they were assigned at birth. The group reports encountering women who have quickly fled bathrooms upon seeing them, angry confrontations, complaints to facility staff and calls to law enforcement who are powerless to stop them because the men are following the law.


Is a miracle in the cards?


Russia has deliberately attacked Ukraine's energy infrastructure and oil and gas sector 76 times in the week since US President Donald Trump announced an energy truce. Over the past week, the Russians launched nearly 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 guided aerial bombs and 66 missiles against Ukraine, most of them ballistic. Energy infrastructure was the main target of these attacks. The president said Russia is trying to plunge Ukraine into a blackout.


After the mentally ill flatulent orange baboon leaves the White House on 20 Jan 2028, the next non-AIPAC presidential administration will still have to deal with malevolent Israel, a mountain of corpses in Gaza, nefarious Russia, the Trumpf Crime Family (TCF), an army of well-armed ICE thugs, Proud Boys and Oafkeepers, pardoned Jan 6 runamoks, an ascending super-wealthy China, the thoroughly corrupt SCOTUS, GOP Senators, a dilapidated FBI, AI surveillance super centers, environmental disasters, tattered international relationships, and powerful malicious oligarchs. And who knows how much work will be required to restore America's destroyed public health care and aviation safety systems, as well as our demoralized military. Still, one can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good; thus, the people of the world eagerly anticipate 20 Jan 2028 just like they awaited the 20 July 1969 Apollo XIII lunar landing. Nothing can stop the countdown.


Microsoft's October 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 1408 CVEs across the October security release. The infographic above summarises severity and risk level by product family; the prose below unpacks the items that need attention this cycle. 3 CVEs carry a zero-day flag (publicly disclosed and/or being exploited in the wild).


Saturday, October 17, 2026

A fire engulfed the historic town hall in Limoges, central France, after a group set the 143-year-old building alight amid unrest following nationwide cost-of-living protests. Local prefect Maurice Barate said the roof had collapsed onto the lower floors, except for the west wing, and that around two-thirds of the building's exterior had already disappeared. The blaze followed demonstrations that escalated into violence in several French cities on Saturday. The extent of the damage to the town hall was still being assessed Read more


Drudge Retort
 

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy