Lover of the Wisconsin Badgers, Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee Brewers and dogs.
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Team Slinky retweeted
IceCube Principal Investigator and @UWMadison Prof. Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” 🎉🏅
#NobelPrizeInPhysics2026
ALT Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 Francis Halzen graphic with a headshot of Francis crossing his arms.
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JFC…
Last week I said it looked like we could be stealing about $11 billion from Venezuela. The question I had after learning that was, if it isn't going back to Venezuela, where is it going? So I followed the money.
Treasury's own data shows about $11 billion more than normal flowing into the State Department's account since February. Venezuela's records show $300 million coming back.
Venezuela has to ask Washington's permission to spend its own oil money. A State Department official told Congress, "It's their money, but ... they have to get our permission." An emergency order blocks every American court from touching it, so the creditors Venezuela owes, most of them American, get nothing.
So who does get paid? The Pentagon took a 35 percent stake in an oil company owned by Alejandro Betancourt, who got rich on Maduro-era contracts. The Miami money laundering investigation into him was closed while that deal came together, though the Justice Department denies ordering it closed. A Venezuelan-born banker facing 20 years got a pardon after $3.5 million went to the president's super PAC in his daughter's name. And in 2012, Betancourt was in Jeffrey Epstein's inbox, copied on a Venezuelan oil pitch.
Last week I asked if we were stealing from Venezuela. After following the money further, I think the better question is who "we" is, because it isn't you and me. It's a small circle of people close to this White House who are getting paid out of another country's oil money, while the Treasury Secretary tells Congress he can't give out a number I found in 15 minutes.
The full article is up on Substack , with every document linked (link is in my bio).
Enjoy!
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Team Slinky retweeted
BREAKING:
Trump announces that if the republicans retain control of both the house and the senate, he will send you ten CDs for just one penny.
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Team Slinky retweeted
Have Your Cake and Take Mine Too
There is an old expression for someone who wants an impossible bargain.
They want to have their cake and eat it too.
What happened in America was worse.
A small group of people got to have their cake, eat it, and then take yours.
That distinction matters.
The great financial rescues of the past twenty years are usually discussed as arguments about economics. Should the banks have been saved? Should interest rates have gone to zero? Should the government have borrowed trillions? Should the Federal Reserve have flooded the system with money?
Those are legitimate questions.
But they obscure the uglier one.
Who caused the problem? Who benefited from the solution? And who ultimately paid for it?
I spent much of my professional life around financial markets. I knew the people making these decisions. I understood the argument in 2008: if the financial system collapsed, everyone would suffer.
That was probably true.
What followed was not inevitable.
The institutions that had taken extraordinary risks were rescued. Their creditors were protected. Money became extraordinarily cheap. Asset prices recovered. Then they soared.
Stocks went up.
Bonds went up.
Real estate went up.
Private companies went up.
If you already owned substantial assets, the rescue was magnificent.
If you were a banker, an investor, a private-equity executive or simply wealthy enough to own a large portfolio, the years that followed created one of the greatest accumulations of financial wealth in modern history.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans who had not designed mortgage derivatives, levered bank balance sheets or constructed the machinery that nearly collapsed the economy lost jobs, homes and savings.
Then came the next rescue.
More borrowing. More money. Lower rates. More support.
Again, asset owners were protected first because asset markets are considered essential to the functioning of the economy.
And again the bill did not disappear.
Bills never disappear.
They change hands.
Eventually the cost arrived in the price of a house. The rent. The grocery bill. The insurance premium. The car payment. The interest rate on a credit card. The cost of starting a business.
The person with $20 million in assets watched those assets become worth $30 million.
The person with $20,000 in the bank watched the purchasing power of that money decline.
That is not merely inequality.
It is a transfer.
And what makes the transfer so vicious is its direction.
The people closest to the creation of the problem possessed the political access, financial sophistication and asset ownership necessary to benefit from the solution.
The people furthest from the creation of the problem possessed the least protection from its cost.
Think about how extraordinary that is.
You make the bet.
The bet goes bad.
The government protects you from the loss.
The rescue increases the value of what you own.
Then somebody who never made the bet pays more for food, shelter and money itself.
You have your cake.
You eat it.
Then you take theirs.
We have spent years debating whether these interventions were technically necessary.
Perhaps some were.
But necessity does not excuse the distribution of the consequences.
If society must intervene to save a system, then the people who created the danger cannot emerge richer while innocent people are handed the invoice.
That is not capitalism.
Capitalism requires the possibility of loss.
It requires accountability.
Otherwise profit belongs to the individual while failure belongs to everyone else.
And eventually people notice.
The bill always comes due.
The real question is why we keep sending it to the people who ordered nothing.
+++I write one of these every day. If you’d rather get them directly from me instead of hoping an algorithm shows them to you, subscribe free dylanratigan.substack.com
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This!
The thing about the multi-billion dollar crypto deal structured by the President and his family, or about their scheme — and there is no other word for it — to sell access to American policy on war and the economy to people paying $1.2 million a year to get the information from the President before it becomes public. The thing about the explicit, profitable, almost theatrical corruption that now operates in broad daylight at the highest levels of American government is that it didn’t start with this President. He just took it to the next level.
I think if you want to understand how we got here, you have to go back to the decision that opened the door. The decision that forfeited the moral standing of American government and never got it back.
The decision made in 2009.
Here is what happened after the financial crisis, stated as plainly as I can state it:
The people who built the system that failed — who paid themselves personally billions of dollars constructing financial instruments that were catastrophically fraudulent, that wiped out retirement accounts and pension funds and the savings of ordinary people across the country and around the world — those people were made whole, even better they were given our money to buy up assets on that they had made cheap via the collapse the created. They kept the money. They kept the institutions. They kept their jobs. The architects of the catastrophe were handed the tools to manage its aftermath and were not held to account for what they had built.
This was a choice. A deliberate, considered, defensible-on-certain-terms choice made by the Obama administration. The argument, as it was made at the time, was stability. That prosecuting the banks, clawing back the compensation, breaking up the institutions that had caused the crisis would create more chaos than it resolved. That the system was too fragile to survive accountability.
I understand the argument. I don’t accept it. But I understand it.
What we are watching now is the downstream consequence of that original forfeiture — but at a scale and with a brazenness that the 2009 version couldn’t have imagined.
Because here is what changes when a government forfeits its moral standing:
The cost of explicit corruption drops to zero.
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Team Slinky retweeted
Attention all HS athletes! We are hosting a prospect camp this upcoming October! A great chance to work with coaches and players, see campus and watch an open practice! Link is in bio!
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Team Slinky retweeted
My district is having a big problem with underage kids getting fake IDs so they can get the creamy garlic fettuccine from Olive Garden.
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