Thursday, December 11, 2025

Israel Is Acting with Impunity. Is It Overconfident in Trump’s Support?

More Americans support Palestine than Israel for the first time ever. But does that matter to Trump?

Links 12/11/2025

Trump Administration Joins EU in Russian Frozen Asset Madness

I want whatever Team Trump is smoking. Their Russian frozen assets plan has achieved impressive new levels of delusion.

U.S. Seizes Oil Tanker Off Venezuelan Coast

Some updates on the US capture of an oil tanker that had just departed from Venezuela.

Economic Questions: James Tobin’s Transaction Tax

A Tobin tax is a no-brainer for reducing speculation and financial crisis risk. That is reason enough to keep it from being implemented.

The U.S. Is Betting the Economy on ‘Scaling’ AI: Where Is the Intelligence When One Needs It?

A detailed discussion of how AI data-center investment boom is soking a societally and financially costly bubble

Coffee Break: GOP Lures Jasmine Crockett Into US Senate Primary

The GOP has succeeded in luring U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett into entering the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Time will tell if they regret getting their wish, but progressives should be under no illusion about her politics.

Wordle, the Wisdom of Crowds, and Bubbles

What Wordle play says about markets and bubbles.

Links 12/10/2025

Moral Means Testing: Utah’s Isolated Homeless “Campus” to Require Education of the Soul Under Trump-Led Push To Divert Attention from Economic Causes of Crisis

Utah aims to produce a model for Trump plan—an isolated “Accountability Campus” where commits will be reformed. Other states and localities are not far behind. 

How Corporate Democrats Made Trump Possible: A 10-Year Timeline

Yes, corporate Democrats did indeed grease the skids for Trump’s presidency, but the key misdeeds go back to Obama.

Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – The Death of Full Spectrum Dominance

The 2025 National Security Strategy is being read as another Trumpist manifesto, but buried in the text is something far more consequential: Washington’s first formal admission that Full Spectrum Dominance is dead. The NSS concedes that the US can no longer fund the military, industrial, and diplomatic machinery required for unipolar primacy, and quietly writes the obituary for the post–Cold War order it was supposed to sustain.

Trump’s Idea for Health Accounts Has Been Tried. Millions of Patients Have Ended Up in Debt.

A look at Trump’s non-solution to the looming problem of the expiration of Covid-era ACA subsidies.

Links 12/9/2025

The UK Government’s Plan to Resurrect the Public Finance Initiative (PFI) Is the Definition of Financial Insanity

The Starmer government, desperate to keep its public borrowing in check, is bringing back (in the words of a senior City of London banker) a “fraud on the people.”