Sam Ratner

Screenshot from FT story by Katie Martin, with final 20 or so words highlighted: "And yet, every conversation I have had with analysts and investors in the past few days, and the tone of almost every research note, has been something like this: “Don’t worry. Yes, this could get bad. Very bad. But Donald Trump doesn’t want high petrol prices in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, so his military will not stick around. The conflict won’t last long, oil and gas supplies will quickly get back to normal. History says the wisest path is to keep a cool head and stay invested, especially as the US, home to the world’s dominant financial markets, is nicely insulated from any energy supply shock.”

I mean it's just extraordinary that all these fund managers, analysts etc had no idea that any huge shock to the energy complex will absolutely mess with the US gasoline price regardless of how "self-sufficient" they are with oil

The international stabilization force for Gaza was always a pipe dream, but this feels like the nail in the coffin.

How State and Local Leaders Are Responding to ICE: Your Questions Answered - Bolts The violence of Trump’s immigration crackdown in cities across the country and the killing of protesters by federal agents have put pressure on local leaders to change their approach to... Read More

NEW: As we've seen the raids & ICE surges, everyone has had so many questions. 'what can states do?' 'what can cities do?' 'what can one ask a sheriff, governor, zoning board, to do?!'

you sent us a lot of your questions.

we just answered 9 of them. i learned a ton myself, i think you will to.

These quotes are actually very revealing about modern American civil-military relations

ICE heavily relies on agencies of all kinds to fuel the deportation machine, but over the past decade they've increasingly relied on the police-to-deportation pipeline to do so. Read the growing list of reported cases of law enforcement collusion with #ICE in NY state: bit.ly/NY-ICEwatch

My favorite paper of 2019 has just been conditionally accepted at AER (lmao)

The Voting Rights Act rapidly increased Black wages in the South via public employment & redistribution

static1.squarespace.com/static/59dc0...

Dems should call for Hegseth to resign

I thought watching friends and mentors die in Iraq would be the dumbest waste of service members' lives in my lifetime. Wrong again!

Yeah, fair

With a bunch of caveats, Rhodesian and South African intervention in Mozambique in the 70s and 80s?

Politico forging new heights of media treating John Bolton like a normal expert and not a guy who's spent the last three decades in a furious struggle with Lindsay Graham and Matthew Kroenig for the title of Man Horniest For War On Iran.

Trump Parties With Millionaires as American Troops Die Millionaires, Republican Party elites and big-spending donors were at Mar-a-Lago to party while Trump’s war raged across at least 10 countries.

Trump partied at Mar a Largo while US servicemembers, Iranian kids, and many others died in his war. Any member of Congress who votes against this week's War Powers Resolution is voting for more of this callous dereliction of duty -- and more death.

www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hosts-...

to be fair it is definitely a big surprise if you’re a complete idiot

New Englanders, go get yourselves a delicious frappe today.

I hate these people with my life.

This is a perfect expression of the modern GOP credo: We don't build, we only demolish.

A true entrepreneur

They’re both systematically razing policy education and a daily cautionary tale about why we need policy education.

Always fun when a guy I knew as a Kagame shill in my old job shows up in my current one as a Netanyahu shill.

sorry, the contention is that *stanford* is not sufficiently aligned with the american military-industrial complex? are... are there multiple stanfords?

We’ve got a podcast for that forthcoming

Not the point, but this is another one for the “policy schools are on the cliff’s edge” files

A Federalism Bottleneck? The Subnational Levers Constraining ICE

New from @splawinski.bsky.social at Can We Still Govern: To stymie ICE, look at the sources of its power.

That includes money but also co-operative 287(g) agreements with state and local govts.

Blocking and reversing those agreements weakens ICE capacity. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-federali...

Read @lorenzocrippa.bsky.social, Edmund Malesky, and Lucio Picci on the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: https://fam.ag/4aCQXQa

Couldn't agree more. Both analytically absurd and deeply undermines organizational credibility. Not holding my breath for an apology though.

Interesting that @acleddata.bsky.social, which has deleted the equivalent post over on X presumably due to (very justified) outrage against Raleigh's endorsement of Ethiopian government aggression against Eritrea, has left this up here.

In a very dumb ouroboros, we've learned a lot about missile defense efficacy *as a result of* the Israelis, if not quite as much *from* them.

AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher | Common Dreams AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini show alarming readiness to deploy nuclear weapons in war games experiment. Study reveals sobering results.

seems bad www.commondreams.org/news/ai-nucl...

Stark visual evidence tonight of America's reluctance to reflect on foreign policy blunders as dozens of Democrats stood to applaud Trump on Iran.

Bipartisan endorsement of sabre-rattling despite huge looming danger + clearly incoherent Trump remarks just before offering little hope for diplomacy.

Wait... what?!

Trump said their nuke sites were “completely and fully obliterated” in U.S. attacks last year.

theintercept.com/2026/02/19/t...