Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power

Another health industry train wreck in the making is the rising difficulty of staffing so-called eldercare needs, particularly dementia care.

Sadly, climate engineering, aka geo-engineering, is coming. Is it possible to properly assess risks and choose least-hazardous approaches?

How America’s liberal immigration regime was a predictable result of how we decide elections.

Democrats react to the ICE-engendered crisis in Minnesota with their usual aplomb, savoir-faire, organization, coherence, and discipline. Just kidding.

How the Democrats brought crypto back from the dead after the FTX collapse and how weak oversight harms consumers and produces systemic risk.

Bill McKibben published The End of Nature in 1989 when he was in his twenties.  His book is generally recognized as the first to address what was then called global warming and now more properly labeled AGW, anthropogenic global warming.  I read the book when it was released and it made perfect sense to me […]

Most economic analysis of Trump’s planned Venezuela oil heist has focused on production. Time for a wee look at refining.

More on Trump’s plans to annex Greenland.

Nuclear proliferation is no longer driven primarily by rogue ambition or regional instability. It is increasingly a rational response to a global order in which legal restraints on force are eroding and security guarantees appear contingent and unreliable. As military power displaces law as the ultimate arbiter of security, nuclear weapons reassert themselves as the only credible deterrent against coercion—pulling multiple threshold states toward rapid proliferation and dangerous alliance entanglements.

How justifications for US foreign and economic policy revolve around the oil trade.

“Sanctions are becoming the preferred weapon of the United States and some allies – not because they are less destructive, but because the toll is less visible,”

Better late than never: states are starting to file suits over ICE thuggery.

A look at a Trump pretext for taking Greenland: its significant stores of oil, gas, and minerals, with the vast majority still underground.