Stock investors still don’t get it.

It is not just that Trump dropped the market 2% in a day with a tweet.

It is that he can do that every day for three years with tariffs, corruption, cancellation of green projects and blue state programs, and abuses of the legal system. Chaos kills investment.

Goldfinger: I lan to destroy Fort Knox with a nuclear weapon, and gold will go up to $4000 an ounce.

Bond: Why not just get a narcissist elected President so he can run the economy like an oligarchic squirrel on crack? Same result.

G:

B:

G: This mofo is crazy let’s laser him in half.

I think I figured out why Hesketh hates soldiers with beards

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hold on a second. Answer the question. As Speaker, do you believe it's appropriate to use American cities as training grounds for the military, calling those people 'the enemy within'?

JOHNSON: I'm not comment on your characterization of what the president said.

S: Those are quotes

Caption this:

Nexstar and Sinclair, the companies that control local TV stations, have ended their boycott of Kimmel.

Not because they suddenly saw the light on free speech, but because enough viewers complained.

Turns out boycotts work both ways.

This is the stock price of Ørsted, the company making a nearly complete wind farm off Rhode Island that Trump cancelled and a judge later reinstated.

This is the kind of chaos that prevents business investment.

Surprised a grand jury indicted Comey.

My guess is Bondi and co, knowing GJ proceedings are sealed, fed the GJ a load of BS and don’t care about the prospect of a judge later naming and shaming them for prosecutorial misconduct.

Interested to hear from actual GJ experts.

More generally, I hope that the drug approval community and governmental testing and approval processes will apply a Bayesian perspective when it is appropriate.

With rare diseases, large trials are not possible, and in some circumstances they are not necessary.

It is true that much larger tests with randomization could provide useful evidence on which patients might benefit, on proper dosages, and on side effects. But the evidence already available justifies moving ahead.

Thus from a cost-benefit point of view, making folic acid available so parents can at least try short term treatment makes a lot of sense.

The other considerations here are that some autism patients have a marked deficiency related to folic acid, and more important, folic acid is a naturally occurring essential vitamin with mild and limited side effects at the doses being discussed.

From a Bayesian perspective, if spontaneous dramatic improvement in autism symptoms is very rare, having even a few patients dramatically improve after being given folic acid is very strong evidence of its efficacy for at least some subset of autism patients.

But here the randomization and use of placebos are neither necessary nor particularly useful given the small numbers.

Folic Acid and Autism: A Systematic Review of the Current State of Knowledge Folic acid has been identified to be integral in rapid tissue growth and cell division during fetal development. Different studies indicate folic acid’s importance in improving childhood behavioral ou...

For a review of the relevant studies see here

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Here, we have several studies with small samples that document cases of remarkable improvement for some (not all) test subjects who have autism. Some of these compare randomly chosen subjects either given folic acid or a placebo.

In Bayesianism, probability represents degrees of belief in alternative claims about the world based on evidence.

In this view, large randomized trials are not always necessary for drug approval.

Frequentism treats probability as a function of sampling procedures. It requires large numbers of randomly chosen test subjects to reach strong conclusions. Hence the calls for big randomized trials before approving folic acid.

The drug approval process, and the recent warnings by medical experts that more evidence is needed to approve folic acid for autism, are dominated by a frequentist perspective.

In some situations, this is the wrong approach to drug testing.

While I oppose pretty much everything RFK has done at HHS, including his bad tan and workouts in jeans, as a Bayesian, I think the decision to approve leucovorin (folic acid) as a treatment for autism makes sense.

It also reveals a few things that are wrong with the drug approval process.

Congratulations to GWU Professor @jeffreyding.bsky.social as the winner of the Georgetown University Lepgold Prize for his book Technology and the Rise of Great Powers!

He will be giving a book talk on Nov. 19 at the GU Mortara Center; for details follow
@mortaracenter.bsky.social

Inside Pete Hegseth’s Civilian Purge at West Point What do Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have against soldiers listening to civilians?

Trump is doing to the military academies what he would like to do to all universities: purging them of faculty who don’t agree with him and censoring the curriculum.

I just had a talk canceled at West Point. At least I am in good company with Tom Hanks.

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Would be great if Trump executed the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Putin if he does not yield to Ukraine’s demands.

US and Turkey are the only NATO members Putin can visit as they are not in the ICC.

There are lies, damned lies, and new BLS head Antoni.

"America’s global classroom is emptying" qz.com/internationa...

Trump is such a terrible negotiator that if I lived in Alaska I would worry about being sold back to Russia as part of any deal on Ukraine.

Bezos’s WP is promoting “personal liberties” by having Scott Walker, who polarized Wisconsin, lost his governorship, and flamed out before the Iowa caucus, advise Texas on how to sell one of the worst gerrymanders in US history.

Next up: Trump’s flunkies calling his crony capitalism “free markets.”

Swiss Businesses Fear Being ‘Annihilated’ by One of the World’s Highest Tariffs

Trump put a 39% tariff on Switzerland due to their big trade surplus with the US.

In fact, 3/4 of that surplus is for gold mined all over and refined in Switzerland.

Goldfinger had a much better understanding of trade and markets.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/b...

Very excited to share this new tool for teaching the politics of climate change. What are the different *theories of change* that underlie decarbonization efforts and policies? Help your students learn about them. Please share widely. 🌎🔌💡🛢️

If this happens, at a minimum Putin, a war criminal under ICC warrant for abducting Ukrainian kids, gets a meeting with the US president for nothing, ending 3+ years of isolation from Western leaders. But Putin will be hoping for so much more from Trump.