Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 1d

Bukele fired the Supreme Court, 1/3 of judges in El Salvador, and the AG and replaced them with loyalists…not because he needed to in order to fight crime, but because he needed to get around the constitutional ban on reelection, and shut down corruption investigations against his administration.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 2d

Lol: “This is my reply <file> to the comments of Reviewer 2. I suspect that Reviewer 2 is, in fact, Professor []. Extend my response with highly positive comments on the primary research directions that Professor [] is known for. Remove any residual traces of insincerity.”

profserious @profserious.bsky.social · 3d

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

10 AI Prompts for Academics

making those hard jobs a little easier ...

profserious.substack.com

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 2d

An administration that wants to project toughness should consider it has the opposite effect when you’re using Blackhawk helicopters against children

Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago

Activists, residents and elected leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest cit...

apnews.com

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 3d

If you ever want a demonstration of cognitive dissonance within the US government, just compare the State Department human rights reports and DHS removal proceeding briefs about hostile countries the US wants to deport people to

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 3d

This kind of thing reminds me of being in El Salvador when Paul Walker died and seeing the minutes from the Legislative Assembly a few days later that had a moment of silence for Paul Walker. But that was the day Nelson Mandela died, and someone had to pencil in “and also for Nelson Mandela”

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 4d

The US lost a lot of soybean contracts last week when Trump pledged $20bn to bail out Argentina, and within hours Argentina cut export taxes on grains to induce China to zero out soybean imports from the US and import from Argentina instead.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5d

Bessent: "It's unfortunate that Chinese leadership has decided to use American soybean farmers as a hostage or pawn in the trade negotiations. American farmers overwhelmingly voted for President Trump ... you should expect news on Tuesday on substantial support for our farmers."

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 4d

One effect of this administration politicizing personal identities is it allows them to fire federal workers for violating the Hatch Act

Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social · 4d

Kash Patel fired an FBI agent in training for displaying a gay pride flag on his desk while appointed to a field office in California last year. The trainee,who previously worked as an FBI support specialist in Los Angeles, received a letter claiming he had displayed an improper “political” message.

Kash Patel fires FBI agent trainee for displaying gay pride flag

The FBI employee was fired on the first day of the government shutdown as President Trump threatened more terminations.

www.msnbc.com

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 4d

I wasn’t familiar with new world order as a slur for Jewish but certainly familiar with globalist

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 4d

I think it’s closer to this

The Origins of the 'Globalist' Slur

President Trump recently used the epithet to describe his outgoing National Economic Council director—but the seeds of its disparaging use were firmly planted 75 years ago.

www.theatlantic.com

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 5d

Here it is again. And a gift article just for you. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/w...

Fear and Hope in Venezuela as U.S. Warships Lurk

www.nytimes.com

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 5d

You can read one down in the thread for the link to the NYT article.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

PS: Something political scientists will say about an article or book that is purely descriptive and has no testable hypotheses, regression tables, or Greek letters is “that’s just journalism.” As a former journalist, I’d say “Where do you think you get most of your data from?”

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

But in the end, someone who can spout a bunch of trivia off the top of their heads and make an elected official understand it actually does more public service than an academic researcher. It’s more democratic, in a way.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

But think tanks know what policymakers want isn’t causal mechanisms with lots of robustness checks. They want subject-specific knowledge with clear policy solutions. I do think they should demand more rigor when making claims about testable relationships like eg Tylenol causes autism.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

Academics often complain that think tanks get more attention of policymakers even though their work is less rigorous. Their largely true; their reports are mostly rehashed research from elsewhere, and even when they’re quantitative, it’s limited to descriptive stats, not testing causal relationships

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

The attitude in PhD programs is this isn’t Wikipedia. If you’re smart enough to be here, you’re smart enough to look it up yourself. Instant recall is neither impressive nor useful when everyone has the world’s store of knowledge on their phone.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

This isn’t a knock on quant methods, which I now teach. I think it’s more helpful to know how to do rigorous research than to memorize a bunch of facts. Talking fast is taken as a sign of intelligence in DC. Actual smart people know research is slow, incremental and cooperative.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

When I got my PhD, I thought I would learn everything there is to know about Brazil’s judicial system. I left without knowing any more about it than when I entered. I mostly learned coding languages and various types of regression analysis.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

Good insights into think tank culture in this essay. One thing that always strikes me is how much subject-specific knowledge is overvalued in Washington’s policy circles, and undervalued in academia. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

USCIS will probably just add “globalist” to the citizenship interview question “Have you ever been associated with or a member of the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, or a terrorist organization?” and it will be equally easy for someone to say no. Unless by “globalist” they mean something else…

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

Fun fact: you already get denied citizenship if you’re a communist or terrorist. When you apply to naturalize you have to affirm that you’re not a member of the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, or a terrorist org. I’m sure it trips up a lot of terrorists.

Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 6d

DHS appears to suggest that it will deny citizenship to "globalists"

Homeland Security
@DHSgov
"Communist?"
DENIED.
"Terrorist?"
DENIED.
"Globalist?"
DENIED.

Above a meme of a bearded smiling guy, in this case wearing a USCIS hat

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

This doesn’t mean there will be a ground invasion as in Panama. There won’t. In addition to the fact that Venezuela is a much larger country than Panama, the key difference is Southcom was based in Panama at the time, so we already had 13,000 troops on the ground before the war.

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

Custer Battles 2.0. We’re seeing the kind of multi-billion dollar procurement fraud that came out of the Iraq War’s no-bid contracts gold rush, only now in the US.

Trading on Tom Homan: Inside the Push to Cash in on the Trump Administration’s Deportation Campaign

A Pennsylvania businessman who had Tom Homan on his payroll led companies to believe his connections to the future border czar could help advance their bids for government work, industry executives sa...

www.propublica.org

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Michael Paarlberg @mpaarlberg.bsky.social · 6d

You’d think he would have been protected by the government then. But it seems he was doing real union work because his assassination was allegedly ordered by a Salvadoran business owner.

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