Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Orange County Register
by Sal Rodriguez

“By now you have seen the reports about alleged widespread welfare and social services fraud in Minnesota. And by now, you have seen the right fixate on the state’s Somali community. The most prominent example of fraud took place via a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of federal COVID dollars as it falsely claimed to distribute meals. The founder of the organization, a white American named Aimee Bock, was convicted of her crimes. … If there’s blame to go around, it seems first aimed at the individual wrongdoers themselves. And then, as a systemic critique, the reckless throwing around of public funds. But, what do you know, MAGA world has chosen to make this not about the need to hold individuals liable for their actions or the need to better manage taxpayer funds. Instead, they made it about Somalis for being Somali.” (01/04/26)

https://archive.is/IpoLN

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“George Orwell got some things right; unlike most political partisans, he saw the problems with the position he supported. He also got quite a lot of things wrong. … The problem is that Orwell, like many of his contemporaries (and ours), did not understand economics and thought he did. Since he wrote we have had extensive experience with free competition, if not as free as Hayek would have wanted, and the result has not been the nightmare that Orwell expected.” (01/04/26)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/orwells-mistakes

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran

“Within hours of U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, President Trump proclaimed that ‘very large United States oil companies would go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country.’ Indeed, at no point during this exercise has there been any attempt to deny that control of Venezuela’s oil (or ‘our oil’ as Trump once described it) is a major force motivating administration actions. One irony here is that even as the White House is proudly embracing fossil-fuel imperialism in global oil, the markets are vastly different.” (01/04/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/venezuela-oil/

Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid

“Agorism is a political philosophy developed by a little-known libertarian burn-out named Samuel Edward Konkin III that advocates destroying the government by engaging in modes of counter-economics that essentially make every market a black market by replacing state facilitated capitalism with an unregulated ecosystem of barter, subsistence production and mutual aid which simultaneously make communities like mine more autonomous and virtually untaxable. Panarchy is a system of governance proposing an infinite constellation of diverse, co-existing, and largely non-territorial governments that individuals can chose to join or leave at will the same way they would a church or a cellphone provider, creating a network of overlapping tribal nations not unlike those once indigenous to the pre-Christian world. With those philosophies in mind, I have developed a loose long-term goal to liberate my people, the rural Queer subaltern betrayed by Pride inc., that builds on the baby steps I have begun taking this year.” (01/04/26)

https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/01/dreaming-of-queer-amish-hezbollah-or.html