Michael Paarlberg

My mom’s federal pension puts her income at $45k/year which by the government’s standards is rich. Assisted living in her area costs $12k/month. Memory care costs $15-18k. Case worker after her last fall says she needs 24/7 care. I said uh ok, human beings normally need to sleep, eat and have jobs.

There really is nothing radical about any of my politics. The only thing that makes me want to burn it all down is having to deal with the healthcare system on a regular basis, trying to get care for someone who needs it.

I really don’t understand how anyone can be a free market capitalist and have any experience at all with the US healthcare system. Particularly if you have or are caring for someone with a chronic illness.

(And even the US trades food, and in fact is Cuba’s top source of chicken).

Bloqueo suggests Cuba is completely cut off from the rest of the world, which it was not. But now for the energy it needs, it is, and the politicized terminology makes it hard to convey how severe of a change this is.

There’s a “boy who cried wolf” hazard of the Cuban government’s insistence on the word bloqueo to mean embargo. The US fully blockaded the island during the 1962 missile crisis, and is now blockading oil shipments. But under the embargo, other countries trade with Cuba, just not the US.

Exiled Iranians and Venezuelans may well support regime change – but diasporas don’t always reflect the politics back home Diasporas are often treated by media and policymakers as monolithic blocs, but the reality is more complicated.

@mpaarlberg.bsky.social's new piece in @us.theconversation.com:

"...Diaspora activists may advocate positions that resonate with Western audiences but find little support among those living under authoritarian rule"

theconversation.com/exiled-irani...

The secrets kept by Armando Fernández Larios, former Pinochet agent arrested by ICE Wanted in Chile for crimes committed during the dictatorship, he was convicted in the US in 1987 for the 1976 assassination in Washington DC of Orlando Letelier and his young assistant Ronni Moffitt

Chilean secret police agent who helped carry out the assassination of ex ambassador Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt was just arrested by ICE, to the surprise of everyone in Chile. Given who is the incoming president of Chile, I worry there’s a deal for immunity after he’s deported.

Dems can’t put all the blame on Trump. The diplomatic geniuses in the Biden admin thought that greenlighting a $1.4B loan to a strongman, who already embezzled the last one and was busy building torture centers, would make him more cooperative with Biden. How did that work out

To paraphrase the late P.J. O’Rourke, giving billions in loans to Argentina and El Salvador is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys

Bitcoin Rout Exposes Bukele’s Gamble and Hits El Salvador Debt Bitcoin’s crash has hit few places as hard as El Salvador, exposing the risks of President Nayib Bukele’s high-stakes embrace of crypto and whipsawing the country’s debt markets.

Now Bukele is counting on Trump to bail him out just like he did Milei. Some of us told the IMF, Treasury, and State Dept that this was going to happen if you gave El Salvador a $1.4 billion loan. Like a whole bunch of times.

Exiled Iranians and Venezuelans may well support regime change – but diasporas don’t always reflect the politics back home Diasporas are often treated by media and policymakers as monolithic blocs, but the reality is more complicated.

Can exiles overthrow dictators? Usually not. I wrote a piece for @us.theconversation.com about why - diaspora communities are often divided, politically distinct from the home country, and can be weaponized by autocratic governments.

Venezuela welcomes Trump-loving US TV channel in ‘marriage of convenience’ Newsmax, granted major access as the first foreign outlet admitted after the US strike, hailed Trump as a ‘liberator’

The Newsmax interview with de facto head of Venezuela’s National Assembly Jorge Rodriguez and brother to de facto president Delcy is “tragicomic, but revealing,” I tell @theguardian.com. Keeping the oil flowing - or the illusion of it - is their only way to remain in Trump’s good graces and in power

This makes it sound like depersonalized metadata but it’s absolutely possible to do this for individuals. I teach my students web scraping and sentiment analysis using Reddit, and point out if I can do this for these posts, I and anyone can do this for your posts.

It’s wild that we not only accept insider trading now, we rely on it to decipher the machinations of a government that is ostensibly accountable to us

YouTube video by Bad Bunny BAD BUNNY FT. EL ALFA - LA ROMANA | X100PRE (Video Oficial)

I like La Romana because it’s a complex song spanning multiple genres - trap, reggaeton, dembow, even bachata with the Leonardo Paniagua sample. It sparks discussion of PR-DR rivalries and unity, and cross-diaspora influences with the popularity of hookah in the Caribbean.

YouTube video by Ricardo Alarco Calle 13 - Latinoamérica (NEW English Subtitles)

In Latin American politics course, for my class on Puerto Rico, I assign a NYT profile of Bad Bunny with Nelson Denis’ War Against All Puerto Ricans, open with BB’s La Romana, and end with Calle 13’s Latinoamérica, which I use to close out the course.

I’m speculating here, but I think it’s the resentment of the colonizer toward the colonized. “We conquered you, gave you citizenship, and this is how you repay us?”

Note: this is a for profit prison run by CoreCivic. People make money off of taxpayers for this.

“There were children in Dilley who were so distraught they cut themselves or talked about suicide…Moms told me that their kids had lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food”

When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies.

It was a "sideshow," I was told.

I wonder what the reaction would have been if BTS had been the Super Bowl halftime show and they sang mostly in Korean. I suspect MAGA would have been less triggered. Something about Spanish, sung by a US citizen, is uniquely upsetting to them.

Some of these workers are in war zones. This is totally nuts.

Seems the only places where Gramsci is taken seriously today are Canary Wharf and Wall Street

“Trust me bro you don’t want to be brainmogged by another booksmaxxer until you cortisol spike and crash out at the library” 😎

In another era, an opposition leader facing a corrupt authoritarian puppet regime, ruling on behalf of a foreign power stealing that country’s resources, might rally the people with a nationalist and anti-imperialist message, not try to curry favor with the imperialists

El fiscal de El Salvador congela una investigación por lavado de dinero de la venta de petróleo venezolano que salpica a Nayib Bukele El presidente recibió, según investigaciones de la Fiscalía, cerca de 3,3 millones de dólares procedentes de las compañías relacionadas con el consorcio Alba Petróleos. “¿Qué empresa no recibió dinero...

Wonder how Trump feels about his friend Bukele making millions by laundering money from PDVSA to help the Maduro government in Venezuela evade US sanctions?

“You all talk about looksmaxxing, right? How about you try brainsmaxxing?”

— me, connecting with my students

Was driving my kids to school and the first thing on the radio was reporting about Trump's video depicting the Obamas as apes and I think many people still don't fully appreciate what it means to have to raise Black children in a country where the president is so brazenly and consistently racist

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

Yeah. Reportedly he’s done it privately for a while. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

AP obtains documents showing Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodríguez has been on DEA's radar for years The Associated Press has learned that Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's acting president, has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, several of which remain ongoing.

Just a reminder that it was never about drugs