“It is almost impossible to get serious criticism of the Israeli state, which (falsely) claims to represent the Jewish people, anywhere near mainstream US culture, even when it takes the form of a critically acclaimed movie, backed by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix, that received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. For decades, pro-Israel lobby groups have dedicated their efforts to telling us that antisemitism is rampant across the West and takes the form of opposition of Israel – a message endlessly amplified by the western media. … The solution, it hardly needs pointing out, is to shut down criticism of Israel to reduce antisemitism.” (01/14/26)
“Donald Trump is trying to erase the 20th century. For those of you too young to remember back that far, he is also going after what we’ve gone through in the past two and a half decades as well. With a thoroughness that is surprising for a man who barely seems to know where he is at any given moment, Trump is rapidly eliminating many of the United States’[s] most important accomplishments during the period that marked our rise as a superpower. It is almost as if he wishes to reverse that rise.” (01/13/26)
“Leonard Glenn Francis, the Malaysian contractor known as ‘Fat Leonard’ at the center of the worst bribery and corruption scheme in U.S. Navy history, must serve the remainder of his 15-year prison sentence, according to an appeals court ruling that became official Monday. … He argued in part that U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino violated his Fifth Amendment rights and abused her discretion in November 2024 when she handed down a sentence that was 40 months longer than what prosecutors recommended. … The Malaysian contractor admitted that he spent decades bribing a rotating cast of officers from the Navy’s 7th Fleet in the Western Pacific, showering them with lavish dinners, luxury hotel rooms, top-shelf liquor, prostitutes and cash. In turn, those officers steered ships to the Southeast Asian ports controlled by Francis and his company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia.” (01/13/26)
“From defense contracting and mortgage finance to credit, housing, and monetary policy, Trump is leaning heavily on command-and-control economics.” (01/13/26)
“Net Present Value (NPV) is a popular decision-making criteria used by firms to make key, crucial choices about how to allocate resources across an economy. Net Present Value forecasts temporally discount future cash flows to their present value to check whether a project creates value. If a project has an NPV greater than zero, it creates value. On the other hand, if a project has an NPV less than zero, the project loses value. NPV forecasting isn’t perfect and there are often assumptions baked into any forecast but there is one particular type of error that occurs most often and has disastrous consequences.” (01/13/26)
“A Milan criminal court on Wednesday acquitted Italian fashion influencer and businesswoman Chiara Ferragni of aggravated fraud in the so-called Pandorogate scandal. The case, one of Italy’s most high-profile celebrity trials, centered on allegations of misleading advertising linked to the promotion of the sweet pandoro Christmas bread — luxury sugar-dusted brioches — in 2022 and Easter eggs sold in 2021 and 2022. Prosecutors, who had requested a 20-month prison sentence, argued that consumers had been led to believe their purchases would support charitable causes, when donations had in fact already been made and were not tied to sales. Ferragni denied any wrongdoing throughout the proceedings.” (01/14/26)
“According to the leader of the monetarists school Milton Friedman our knowledge of the world of economics is elusive. Consequently, it does not really matter what the underlying assumptions of a theory employed to ascertain the facts of reality are. In fact, anything goes, as long as the theory can yield good predictions. Again, on this way of thinking any theory that is applied on historical data could be valid as long as it could produce accurate predictions. … Experience of economic history is always the experience of complex phenomena. It can never convey knowledge of the kind the experimenter abstracts from a laboratory experiment. Moreover, It is vain to search for coefficients of correlation if one does not start from a theoretical insight acquired beforehand.” (01/13/26)
“The U.S. economy, after a tumultuous year of tariffs and trade wars, appears to have performed better than feared earlier in the year, with annual GDP growth through the third quarter of about 2 percent, including a surprisingly healthy bump in the last reported quarter. But that, contrary to what U.S. President Donald Trump says, is not because of tariffs but in spite of them. And 2026 looks set to be an even rockier year on the trade front, with further negative implications for U.S. economic performance.” (01/13/26)
