RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • US: Judge rules firm can resume wind project halted by Trump

    Source: CNBC

    “Shares of Danish renewables giant Orsted rose nearly 5% on Tuesday morning, shortly after a U.S. judge cleared the company to resume work on its nearly finished Revolution Wind project. … The White House halted five major offshore wind developments at the end of last year, including Orsted’s project off the coast of Rhode Island. Officials cited national security concerns identified by the Pentagon as the reason for the suspension. Orsted filed a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s decision earlier this month, saying that the lease suspension would cause ‘substantial harm’ to the Revolution Wind project. In a hearing on Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the Court should be ‘very skeptical of the government’s true motives’ for putting a stop to the project, according to Reuters news agency.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/13/orsted-trump-wind-power-revolution-wind.html

  • Uganda: Regime Orders Two Rights Groups to Halt Work Days Before Election

    Source: US News & World Report

    “Uganda’s government has ordered two local ‌rights ​groups to halt their work ‌days before Thursday’s election, which the United Nations Human Rights Office ​says is taking place in an atmosphere of repression and intimidation. The authorities have detained hundreds of opposition supporters, ‍the UN agency had said ​in a report in November, ahead of the January 15 election in which President Yoweri Museveni, ​81, is ⁠looking to extend his four-decade rule. Museveni, who came to power in 1986 after leading a five-year rebellion, is Africa’s third-longest ruling head of state. He has changed the constitution twice to remove age and term limits, and his dominance of Ugandan institutions means there is little prospect of ‌an election upset in the East African country of 46 million, political analysts say.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-01-13/uganda-orders-two-rights-groups-to-halt-work-days-before-election

  • Trump Threatens New Tax Hike on American Buyers of Goods from Countries “Doing Business” with Iran

    Source: Time

    “As Donald Trump mulls whether or not the U.S. will intervene militarily in Iran in response to the deadliest anti-regime protests and riots there in years, the President is happy to employ one of his ‘favorite’ words to put pressure on Tehran: tariffs. ‘Effective immediately, any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America,’ Trump posted on Truth Social Monday night. ‘This Order is final and conclusive.’ It’s unclear what the President meant by ‘doing business,’ and which countries the latest policy actually covers. The White House has not yet published any information about the new tariff policy or what legal authority it relies on, nor did the White House immediately respond to TIME’s request for clarification.” (01/13/26)

    https://time.com/7345774/trump-iran-tariffs-trade-china-india-uae-turkiye-brazil/


  • Avoiding the Resource Trap in Post-Maduro Venezuela

    Source: EconLog
    by Leonida Zelmanovitz

    “The recent removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela’s presidency is a dramatic development after more than two decades of socialist experimentation under Hugo Chávez and Maduro, characterized by expropriation, macroeconomic mismanagement, and political repression. Although there is much uncertainty about the economic and political future of Venezuela, economics can offer some guidance — and warnings. One such lesson has to do with the dangerous temptation to base economic recovery solely on the oil sector. Venezuela’s prospects depend critically on the quality of its institutional and policy choices from now on.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.econlib.org/econlog/avoiding-the-resource-trap-in-post-maduro-venezuela

  • Judicial Nation-Building

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Sam Negus

    “The Early Republic’s maritime jurisprudence is even more relevant given the immense power of the modern executive.” (01/13/26)

    https://lawliberty.org/book-review/judicial-nation-building/

  • A Conservative Requiem for Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Ann Coulter

    “The Grateful Dead was supremely American. No other nation on earth could have produced music like this, a synthesis of blues, R&B, country, folk, rock, even a little jazz. Nowhere else would a band origin story be the following: The 16-year-old Weir and friends were bumming around Palo Alto on New Year’s Eve 1963, heard the sound of a banjo, and followed it to a music store where they happened upon Jerry Garcia waiting for his banjo students to show up. They never did, so Bobby and his friends picked up some instruments and played jug music with Jerry into the night. It was so much fun, Jerry and Bobby decided to form a band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, which became the Warlocks, and then the Grateful Dead. Find that in Japan — find it in England.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-conservative-requiem-for-bob-weir-and-the-grateful-dead/

  • How Money Laundering Became a Catch-All Excuse to Bully and Surveil

    Source: The Daily Economy
    by Christopher Lingle & Emile Phaneuf III

    “The term ‘money laundering’ was coined after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, yet it was not formalized into law with any federal offense until the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. These days, law enforcement and regulatory agencies such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and Financial Action Task Force (FATF) typically use the term alongside other terms that imply an obvious victim needing protection: ‘terrorist financing,’ ‘human trafficking.’ This is meant to provoke a strong reaction against money laundering as a practice. One problem with the association of money laundering with these other terms that obviously justify a strong response to prevent them is that money laundering does not, in itself, always have a clear victim.” (01/13/26)

    https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/how-money-laundering-became-a-catch-all-excuse-to-bully-and-surveil-americans/

  • The Ukraine Snare Still Beckons

    Source: Antiwar.com
    by Ted Galen Carpenter

    “Despite the widespread expectation that President Donald Trump would end Washington’s entanglement in NATO’s proxy war using Ukraine against Russia, it is increasingly evident that the fundamental features of U.S. policy remain unaltered. Trump personally has sent an array of mixed signals about his intentions. Although he has pressured Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to accept the reality that Kyiv must be willing to make territorial concessions to Moscow in any peace accord, he also has been receptive to Zelensky’s demand that Ukraine be given reliable ‘security guarantees’ in such a settlement. Indeed, during the recent summit meeting between the two leaders, the main point of disagreement appeared to be that Zelensky wanted a commitment lasting 50 years, whereas Trump was prepared to offer only 15 years.” (01/13/26)

    https://original.antiwar.com/ted_galen_carpenter/2026/01/12/the-ukraine-snare-still-beckons/

  • Cancel Culture Goes MAGA

    Source: Liberal Currents
    by Guillaume AW Attia

    “MAGA’s campaign of government censorship and repression is an assault on fundamental free speech values.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.liberalcurrents.com/cancel-culture-goes-maga/

  • The Monkey’s Paw Curls

    Source: Astral Codex Ten
    by Scott Alexander

    “Isn’t ‘may you get exactly what you asked for’ one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. … Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn’t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data.” (01/13/26)

    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls

  • US trashed Somalia, can we really scold its people for coming here?

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Ahmed Ibrahim

    “The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota and the resulting vitriol directed at them by President Trump. Trump’s targeting of Somalis long preceded the current allegations of fraud, going back to his first presidential campaign in 2016. A central theme of Trump’s anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump’s reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia’s state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else.” (01/13/26)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/somali-people-in-the-us/

  • Starlinking Iranian Protest

    Source: Common Sense
    by Paul Jacob

    “In June 2025, Elon Musk helped protesters in Iran by providing free access to his Starlink satellite service. The service restored a means of communicating with each other and the rest of the world that had been blocked when the Iranian government shut down the country’s Internet. The mullahs tend to do that when the pressure on their regime reaches a certain pitch. As has certainly happened again over the last few weeks. Some 500 protesters have been killed so far, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, as the unrest spreads. Again, the Iranian government has shut down the country’s Internet. Is Musk stepping in?” (01/13/26)

    https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/01/13/starlinking-iranian-protest/

  • Trump 2.0, Year 1: A Libertarian Nightmare

    Source: Reason
    by Brian Doherty

    “A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know. Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.” (01/12/26)

    https://reason.com/2026/01/12/trump-2-0-year-1-a-libertarian-nightmare/

  • McKinley’s Ghost

    Source: Independent Institute
    by Ivan Eland

    “Trump loves to compare himself to the 19th-century populist president Andrew Jackson, who began the brutal ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from their land. But his presidency more resembles that of William McKinley at the turn of the 20th century. McKinley, like Trump, favored high tariffs as a means to protect certain businesses. Also, in the closing years of that century, McKinley initially was reluctant to go to war with Spain over Spanish repression of an off-and-on again (since the mid-1800s) rebellion in its Cuban colony that did not threaten U.S. security. (This is similar to Trump’s desire to avoid ‘forever wars’ — uch as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya – during his first term.) … Yet after the decisive U.S. victory over Spain in the Caribbean and the Pacific, McKinley willingly reveled in grabbing Spanish colonies as imperial booty.” (01/12/26)

    https://www.independent.org/article/2026/01/12/mckinleys-ghost/

  • Can the Ayatollahs Fall?

    Source: Quillette
    by Benny Morris

    “Amid the darkness of a communications blackout, Iranians are fighting for their freedom and the totalitarian theocracy under which they have lived since 1979 seems more threatened than ever before.” (01/12/26)

    https://quillette.com/2026/01/12/can-the-ayatollahs-fall/

  • Britain Does Not Have Long to Avoid Economic Collapse

    Source: Foundation for Economic Education
    by Mitchell Palmer

    “According to Ernest Hemingway, there are two ways to go bankrupt: ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ It’s a lesson the UK would do well to remember. Rather than fixing our frayed social contract, successive governments have merely tinkered with the public finances, doing just enough to keep the ship afloat. This deck-chair rearranging cannot continue forever.” (01/12/26)

    https://fee.org/articles/britain-does-not-have-long-to-avoid-economic-collapse/

  • Trump Promotes Regulatory Relief — Not Subsidies — as the Solution to Obamacare

    Source: Bluegrass Institute
    by Michael F Cannon

    “States don’t need to wait for Congress. In Kentucky, Rep. Vanessa Grossl (R‑Georgetown) introduced legislation that would immediately let residents access Obama’s 2014 relief by removing barriers to Obamacare-exempt plans available in US territories.” (01/12/26)

    https://www.bluegrassinstitute.org/trump-promotes-regulatory-relief-not-subsidies-as-the-solution-to-obamacare/