Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Tanya Goudsouzian & Ibrahim Al-Marashi

“Ali Al Zaidi has launched an unprecedented but much needed crackdown on figures tied to the country’s massively corrupt patronage system.” (07/07/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ali-zaidi-iraq-corruption/

Source: Los Angeles Times
by Jon Duffy

“The Trump administration is asking Congress to pay for the consequences of a war with Iran that Congress never authorized. Before lawmakers write that check, they should require a serious accounting of what the war has already cost — and what the administration is asking them to pay for.” (07/07/26)

https://archive.is/UXARt

Source: Cobden Centre
by Dr. Frank Shostak

“Contrary to KP, an economic boom is not about economic prosperity and wealth generation, but about the diversion of resources from the wealth generating activities towards activities that consume and do not produce wealth i.e. undermine the wealth generating process. Or we could say that an economic boom gives rise to activities that are engaged in consumption, which is unbacked by the previous production of wealth i.e. non-productive consumption. If for some reason the diversion of resources is arrested, various non-productive activities that sprang up as a result of this diversion come under pressure i.e. an economic bust emerges.” (07/07/26)

https://www.cobdencentre.org/2026/07/technology-shocks-and-boom-bust-cycles/

Source: Washington Monthly
by Rodger D Citron

“Irked by liberals from Princeton to Yale and the Justice Department to the Supreme Court, the conservative jurist finishes another term unbowed.” (07/07/26)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/07/07/samuel-alito-revenge-for-the-sixties/

Source: Independent Institute
by Phillip W Magness

“The significance of trade to the Revolution’s origins helps to resolve a long-observed paradox about the colonists’ motives. Despite the Revolution’s reputation as a tax revolt, Americans paid relatively low tax rates compared to people in England proper. The total sum was ‘paltry,’ and most of Parliament’s new revenue measures were ‘moderate and often short-lived,’ to quote economist Deirdre Nansen Mccloskey. They nonetheless sparked a political upheaval against the assertion of a novel and foreign authority. The issue was not the tax rate; it was the fact that Parliament could claim a tax power over trade, and thus over all else.” (07/06/26)

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/07/06/america-founded-tariff-men/

Source: Persuasion
by Harry Cheadle

“Alicia Kennedy, one of the most celebrated food writers of her generation, sometimes seems to approach food as a series of moral dilemmas waiting to be untangled. In her new memoir, On Eating—a useful starting point to consider progressive culture as a whole—she writes that alcohol ‘is one of the most wasteful things one can consume, producing twelve times the wastewater for the amount of spirit created.’ Climate change may make wheat scarce, she worries. Sugar, meanwhile, conjures up a litany of horrors—it was originally harvested by slaves, and the present-day sugar industry is often accused of mistreating workers. … For at least a decade, left-of-center, educated, middle-class-and-above Westerners have become inflamed with guilt for the way we live. In a roundabout way, the left has reinvented the idea of sin.” (07/06/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/progressives-have-reinvented-sin