Could we have one news day that isn’t batshit crazy?

Rodrigo Duterte is accused of being an ‘indirect co-perpetrator’ in the murders of dozens of alleged criminals.

Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have withdrawn from the International Criminal Court. The past and present show that only states who fear accountability for atrocity crimes attack or leave the #ICC. guardian.ng/news/burkina...

My institution has revealed exactly who they are; latest installment = telling us what we can’t do on social media

A $100k “price” for H1-B visas is like a tariff on STEM labor. And the first rule of tariffs is clear: never tax your inputs — that just makes American firms less competitive than their foreign competitors.

Was just reading this in Bradley & Kelley (2008: 13): "Members of the UN...can lose voting rights in the General Assembly if they fail to pay dues." Haha interesting move by the UN possible if the US fully stops paying dues.

My daughter & I were the only customers at my nail salon Saturday afternoon. Lots of businesses are suffering as inflation on groceries and many goods with tariffs rise. Halloween decorations also running way more expensive. Businesses have paid many of these costs, but that is changing rapidly.

Viktor Orban has made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the EU www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

The US wasn't attacked. Nothing like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor happened. Drug dealers aren't making war, they're breaking laws to make money. Civilian boats aren't a military threat. As @bcfinucane.bsky.social explains with @gregsargent.bsky.social, the govt is redefining words to claim vast powers.

What an honor to have our article "Do Government Positions Held by Women Matter?" selected as an Editor's pick and a part of the new @politicsgenderj.bsky.social virtual issue! www.cambridge.org/core/journal... @edinburghpir.bsky.social @uoe-sps.bsky.social @uoe-gender-ed.bsky.social

Student visas dropped to a four year low. Trump also cuts spending on research by hundreds of billions on college campuses. This is how you end American exceptionalism. I gifted this article so you can read it www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Committing war crimes and violating international law

“They studied 51 populist presidents and prime ministers who were in power between 1900 and 2020 and found that after 15 years, GDP per capita was 10% lower when compared with a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual.”

"As the Supreme Court was making the nation less democratic, it was also working to make its government less responsive and effective." newrepublic.com/article/1997...

The lawlessness continues

Torrential rain and destructive winds have struck northern Philippines as Super Typhoon Ragasa makes landfall. Described as the world's strongest storm this year, authorities have ordered the evacuation of thousands of residents and suspended work and schools in affected areas.

👇 Great opportunity for post-docs! Come to the @mzesunimannheim.bsky.social for 2-4 weeks as visiting fellow! Application deadline 28 Nov 2025.

Nada. Zip. Nothing. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

We are fast becoming a banana republic, with two standards of justice. If you oppose the leader, you go to jail just for speech. If you're a loyalist, you get immunity for your crimes. That's what happens in Iran - not the United States. This is a decision moment for America.

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

I don’t know who these Vikings are, but we need more of this haha.

NATO scrambled two Eurofighters from Germany’s Rostock-Laage base to intercept a Russian Il-20M reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea, Handelsblatt reports. The jet had no flight plan and wasn’t responding to air traffic control.

🤷‍♀️

This has been obvious for a long time, but I'm glad more people are saying it. I was recently asked whether Europe and Japan (and others) could sustain their own "liberal order" without the U.S. The answer is yes, in theory, especially if the U.S. just "sat things out" — that is, remained neutral.

It was apparent that T lacks credibility to defend allies, but bloody hell 🤷‍♀️

Bloody hell. For context, that is 10x the high-end estimate of Soviet fatalities in the 1979-89 Afghanistan war.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

👏👏👏

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

Spoke with @washingtonpost.com about the absence of legal justification for the U.S. government’s premeditated killing of people aboard boats in the Caribbean. “In essence, the President is asserting a license to kill outside the law.” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

A lot of respect for Kristof for not letting this go. It will be easy to forget the USAID cuts in the years to come. It's good to have people around making us remember.

Disaster for academia also 😡

The White House convinced many its focus is “illegal” immigration. Then: —Today’s near-ban on LEGAL high-skill work visas —Ended LEGAL refugee visas —Slashing LEGAL student visas —Ban all/most LEGAL visas for 17 countries —Ending LEGAL parole & TPS for millions Not a “crackdown”. A lawless purge.

Go Hawks!

😂😂😂 The senility runs deep with this one

T admin death count

When you’ve lost Ted Fucking Cruz

9-0 SCOTUS ruling from last year: “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

They were always going to do this. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention 🤷‍♀️

“The rate of civilian deaths across Sudan has increased, the report says, with 3,384 civilians dying in the first six months of the year, a figure equalling 80 percent of the 4,238 civilian deaths throughout the whole of 2024.” www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/...

🇪🇺❗️Update: The EU bans Russian liquefied natural gas imports into Europe and lowers the oil price ceiling to $47.6, according to Ursula von der Leyen. — Rosneft and Gazprom Neft, as well as other companies, particularly in China, have been hit by a complete transaction ban.

Great strategy to deter China 😂

New week's cover of The New Yorker, "Remote Control," by Barry Blitt.

in the 80s the supreme court held that a public employee who said, in the workplace, that then-president ronald reagan should be killed, could not be fired for her speech. (Rankin v. McPherson) any attempt to legally justify the firing of public employees for their statements about kirk is laughable

Political science has obsessed over polarization while largely neglecting extremism, and with few exceptions has been inattentive to the roots of it all—power, structures, and identities. Too many elites are just as unprepared. Thus, their takes are empty, trite, and naive.

One marker of a weakening labor market: there are now more job seekers than job openings in the US. My @morningjoe-msnbc.bsky.social Chart

Just repeating history upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

USMCA -> MCA