Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: ProSocial Libertarians
by Andrew Jason Cohen

“Let’s be clear: we are incredibly lucky — even blessed — to live now when so much more than ever is available to us to buy and sell. We have high and low cultural entertainment. We have medicine, healthcare, comfortable clothes, homes, reliable means of transportation, far more career paths than those of us born even in the ‘late 1900s’ could have imagined. The world is better than ever. We have more, we are healthier, and we live longer. All of this is due to liberalism and its requirement to respect humanity.” (10/22/25)

https://prosociallibertarians.substack.com/p/three-cheers-for-liberalism

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Marik Episkopos

“Rarely are foreign policy scholars and analysts blessed with as crystalline a case study in abject failure as the Western approach to Belarus since 2020. From promoting concrete security interests, advancing human rights to everything in between, there is no metric by which anything done toward Minsk can be said to have worked. But even more striking has been the sheer sense of aggrieved befuddlement with the Trump administration for acknowledging this reality and seeking instead to repair ties with Belarus.” (10/22/25)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-belarus/

Source: CounterPunch
by Binoy Kampmark

“If the intention is to curb overdoses on US soil from drug use, flow of fentanyl would be the object of the exercise. But fentanyl hails from Mexico, not South America. The broader agenda is a more traditional one: the assertion of the imperium’s control over countries in the Americas, eliminating regimes deemed unfriendly to Washington’s interests. Narcotics has become the throbbing pretext, with Trump accusing Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of being the leader of the drug trafficking organisation Cartel of the Suns.” (10/22/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/22/the-great-narco-pretext-trump-readies-for-regime-change-in-venezuela/

Source: The Daily Economy
by Hannah Frankman Hood

“American kids’ ability to focus is under a full-frontal assault, and it should be taken seriously as a national threat. Attacks come from all sides: dopamine triggers and flashy apps, streaming services and immersive games, TikTok reels and endless doomscrolling. Everybody’s talking about falling test scores and America’s ability to keep up with the rest of the world (especially the East) in its academic performance. But no amount of reform is worth a lick if kids can’t focus long enough to read a book.” (10/22/25)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-kids-cant-focus/

Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“The U.S. economy is in a weird place right now on multiple fronts. One immediate problem is that policymakers are flying somewhat blind because the government shutdown has delayed the September employment report. According to the last report available (which was for August), unemployment is relatively low by historical standards. But another source of weirdness is that many people feel very bad about the economy: Consumer sentiment is much weaker than it was pre-Covid, in fact comparable to its level at the depths of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.” (10/222/25)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-us-economy-is-in-worse-shape