Michael Paarlberg

Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago Activists, residents and elected leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest cit...

An administration that wants to project toughness should consider it has the opposite effect when you’re using Blackhawk helicopters against children

If you ever want a demonstration of cognitive dissonance within the US government, just compare the State Department human rights reports and DHS removal proceeding briefs about hostile countries the US wants to deport people to

This kind of thing reminds me of being in El Salvador when Paul Walker died and seeing the minutes from the Legislative Assembly a few days later that had a moment of silence for Paul Walker. But that was the day Nelson Mandela died, and someone had to pencil in “and also for Nelson Mandela”

The US lost a lot of soybean contracts last week when Trump pledged $20bn to bail out Argentina, and within hours Argentina cut export taxes on grains to induce China to zero out soybean imports from the US and import from Argentina instead.

One effect of this administration politicizing personal identities is it allows them to fire federal workers for violating the Hatch Act

I wasn’t familiar with new world order as a slur for Jewish but certainly familiar with globalist

The Origins of the 'Globalist' Slur President Trump recently used the epithet to describe his outgoing National Economic Council director—but the seeds of its disparaging use were firmly planted 75 years ago.

I think it’s closer to this

Fear and Hope in Venezuela as U.S. Warships Lurk

Here it is again. And a gift article just for you. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/w...

You can read one down in the thread for the link to the NYT article.

PS: Something political scientists will say about an article or book that is purely descriptive and has no testable hypotheses, regression tables, or Greek letters is “that’s just journalism.” As a former journalist, I’d say “Where do you think you get most of your data from?”

But in the end, someone who can spout a bunch of trivia off the top of their heads and make an elected official understand it actually does more public service than an academic researcher. It’s more democratic, in a way.

But think tanks know what policymakers want isn’t causal mechanisms with lots of robustness checks. They want subject-specific knowledge with clear policy solutions. I do think they should demand more rigor when making claims about testable relationships like eg Tylenol causes autism.

Academics often complain that think tanks get more attention of policymakers even though their work is less rigorous. Their largely true; their reports are mostly rehashed research from elsewhere, and even when they’re quantitative, it’s limited to descriptive stats, not testing causal relationships

The attitude in PhD programs is this isn’t Wikipedia. If you’re smart enough to be here, you’re smart enough to look it up yourself. Instant recall is neither impressive nor useful when everyone has the world’s store of knowledge on their phone.

This isn’t a knock on quant methods, which I now teach. I think it’s more helpful to know how to do rigorous research than to memorize a bunch of facts. Talking fast is taken as a sign of intelligence in DC. Actual smart people know research is slow, incremental and cooperative.

When I got my PhD, I thought I would learn everything there is to know about Brazil’s judicial system. I left without knowing any more about it than when I entered. I mostly learned coding languages and various types of regression analysis.

Good insights into think tank culture in this essay. One thing that always strikes me is how much subject-specific knowledge is overvalued in Washington’s policy circles, and undervalued in academia. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

USCIS will probably just add “globalist” to the citizenship interview question “Have you ever been associated with or a member of the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, or a terrorist organization?” and it will be equally easy for someone to say no. Unless by “globalist” they mean something else…

Fun fact: you already get denied citizenship if you’re a communist or terrorist. When you apply to naturalize you have to affirm that you’re not a member of the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, or a terrorist org. I’m sure it trips up a lot of terrorists.

This doesn’t mean there will be a ground invasion as in Panama. There won’t. In addition to the fact that Venezuela is a much larger country than Panama, the key difference is Southcom was based in Panama at the time, so we already had 13,000 troops on the ground before the war.

Trading on Tom Homan: Inside the Push to Cash in on the Trump Administration’s Deportation Campaign A Pennsylvania businessman who had Tom Homan on his payroll led companies to believe his connections to the future border czar could help advance their bids for government work, industry executives sa...

Custer Battles 2.0. We’re seeing the kind of multi-billion dollar procurement fraud that came out of the Iraq War’s no-bid contracts gold rush, only now in the US.

You’d think he would have been protected by the government then. But it seems he was doing real union work because his assassination was allegedly ordered by a Salvadoran business owner.

Presumably Hammer Sr. was there with the AIFLD, the now-disbanded international wing of the labor federation that notoriously became an instrument of US espionage during the Cold War, earning it the nickname AFL-CIA (which even the CIA found funny it seems)

El Salvador arrests ex-soldier in slaying of US advisers SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador police say they've arrested a man convicted of participating in the 1981 killing of two American labor advisers and the head of the country's land reform a...

Interesting US-Cuba-El Salvador connection: the current US de facto ambassador to Cuba is the son of an AFL-CIO official who was killed by a death squad in El Salvador while advising Salvadoran unions during the Civil War.

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

This is just a sliver of what the the US Administration’s vast and unprecedented attack on our research system has stolen from us.

Americans who will suffer from horrible disease, and die, who didn’t need to. Conservative and Liberal Americans.

Cuban foreign minister says Rubio's 'personal' agenda in Latin America risks Trump's peace prospects Cuba's top diplomat says recent U.S. escalations in the Caribbean are a result of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “personal” agenda against the region.

Cuba is trying to defend its ally Venezuela by sowing division in the Trump cabinet, appealing to Trump’s “mandate for peace” and blaming hostilities on Rubio’s “personal agenda.” They should try nominating Trump for a Nobel Prize instead.

Trump’s Argentina bailout enriches one well-connected billionaire A $20 billion taxpayer-funded rescue package for Argentina is a gift for a hedge fund manager with personal and professional ties to the Treasury Secretary

Nothing about the Argentina bailout makes sense - not a top US trade partner, not a source of migrants or drugs, chronic defaulter on loans - so of course the explanation is some billionaire who’s connected to the right people.

If Trump thought bailing out Milei would push Argentina out of China’s orbit and into the US’s, he got the answer within hours of the agreement when Argentina lifted export taxes on grains to sell more soybeans to China and undercut US farmers.