Paulo L dos Santos

Poll suggests only a quarter of Americans support attacks on Iran US lawmakers heap pressure on Trump following the first US soldier deaths after Khamenei's killing.

The Reuters-Ipsos poll showing only one quarter of US respondents supporting attacks on Iran was carried out BEFORE the Trump administration announced the first deaths of US troops.
aje.news/ydm2xf

How China’s universities joined the global elite Investment by Beijing has transformed the country’s institutions despite lingering questions about research quality and intellectual freedom

Pretty sure it was not by multiplying the number of highly paid administrators, pilling on real-estate investments, burning money on coaches, or adopting the worst aspects of contemporary corporate management…
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Yes, US elites have not really had to care about anything beyond their self-interest in decades. Brazil and South Korea have more recent experiences of large-scale working-class and broader social struggle. That creates facts to which elites and the institutions they typically control must adapt.

Moody’s alert cites gap in data centre accounting for Big Tech companies Accounting limitations mean tens of billions in liabilities may be concealed for leasing costs

The AI boom appears to be part dotcom bubble, part Theranos hype, and part WorldCom accounting.

What could possibly go wrong?? !

#EconSky
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

A nearly perfect day at an upstate second-hand bookstore… #Statistics #MildOCD

Conflate money value added per hour with labour productivity, include sectors whose “value added” involves what is better understood as transfers, and teach it for long enough to make it all seem normal, and you get this kind of assessment…#EconSky

The closing phrase about a 5yo citizen is so disturbing and telling. We’re well and truly in an environment where the words spoken by regime supporters don’t have to make logical sense. They just need to invoke the desired sense of “us versus them” to be effective.

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

The media moved on when trump said he had a new tone because as the constitution states the president is the editor in chief of all news outlets

Tariff Man Tumbles, Fumbles and Bumbles on Trade | Washington Spectator When it comes to economics, we know two things about Donald Trump. He is obsessed with the US trade deficit. And he thinks tariffs, or import taxes, will solve the trade deficit problem.

@publicseminar.bsky.social @elizabethcooper.bsky.social @plbds.bsky.social @avgevork.bsky.social My latest @washspectator.bsky.social piece-- on Trump's tariff/trade policy. Enjoy!
washingtonspectator.org/tariff-man-t...

Jew in Amsterdam here. Please use Anne Frank as a comparison point to explain how state persecution of scapegoats impacts children, that is the point of her example, thanks

ICE agents are using an app developed by Palantir that draws on the health records of millions of Americans to find and detain illegal immigrants
www.bmj.com/content/392/...

People need to listen closely and take stock of what is being said here. This federal official is commanding 22,000 heavily armed men across the country.

A car crash is a tragedy, Mr. President. Brownshirts terrorizing immigrants, citizens of certain ethnicities, and now openly executing people in broad daylight is rising fascism. You used to defend this kind of prevarication on electoral grounds. What’s the excuse now?

Target in Minneapolis has pulled Hispanic employees off of pick-up order duty after ICE arrested two US citizen Hispanic employees while on the job.

“I’m literally a U.S. citizen!” one shouted as they escorted him into a van.

An insane, perfect encapsulation of it all:

The same day Trump’s agents kill a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse in broad daylight, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon join Trump to watch a private screening of a film about his wife directed by an alleged sexual abuser who was seen shirtless in the Epstein Files

This was between the first and second shot, of a total of ten fired.

The New York Times When a Coat Becomes a Symbol of Conflict How the choice of outerwear for Gregory Bovino, the president’s Border Patrol chief, turned into part of the deportation story.

Gregory Bovino Der ICE-Kommandant im Nazi-Look Martialisch und effektheischend, so tritt ICE-Kommandant Gregory Bovino gern auf. 22.01.2026, 17.09 Uhr

the nyt style section vs. der spiegel

The whole interview is worth it

Minneapolis protester as he's being brutalized by feds: "You're gonna have to kill me! You're gonna have to kill me! I've done nothing wrong! My name is Matthew James! I'm a US citizen! You're gonna kill me! Is that what you want?" (You can hear his wife screaming)

I thought this guy (of all people!!) dished out a few pertinent if inconvenient truths today...

A candid moment by Carney on the fiction of the US-led "rules-based order," the calculations behind its historical acceptance, & their breakdown under the Trump administration.
You cannot accept economic integration "when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

US citizen says ICE removed him from his Minnesota home in his underwear after warrantless search Federal immigration agents have detained a U.S. citizen in Minnesota at gunpoint without a warrant. That's according to ChongLy “Scott” Thao, who says agents forced open his door, entered with guns drawn and led him outside in his underwear in freezing conditions.

Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.

Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds New research contradicts President Trump’s claim that foreigners are footing the bill.

In other news, Pope seen in local woods giving communion to defecating bear.

www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

DHS seeking to deport two men who said fellow ICE detainee was killed The two men’s eyewitness accounts of the Jan. 3 death of Geraldo Lunas Campos at a Texas detention camp differ from the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the incident.

The Trump admin is moving to quickly deport two men who witnessed, they say, ICE guards choke a fellow detainee to death.

The admin moved to deport men right after they spoke the Washington Post.

This is the death that the medical examiner has already ruled likely homicide.

wapo.st/4qR1T1U

Samir Amin, more than half a century ago… #EconSky #PolEcon

Cripes a’mighty people, Steven Miller is not staging a militarized ethnic cleansing and sending the border cops to murder people in the street to distract from the Epstein files. He’s doing it because he and Trump (and Vance and Homan and Noem etc) really really want to.

Some new material...#EconSky

Since I'm working on information-theoretic approaches to statistical analysis these days...
#EconSky

This may be one of my most underrated economemes... #EconSky