Econ prof, 7th-grade math teacher, conservative; Fundamentalist, mainly; Uni '76, Yale '80, MIT '84. MFSA. Law & econ, game theory. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Bloomington, Indiana
Joined May 2009
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1. Please be polite.
2. Do disagree, but don't swear, blaspheme, or abuse.
3. I write as if my late parents are reading. Please do the same.
4. You always have control over how you conduct yourself.
5. A more civil society starts with you.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
You can cancel an election and ban the winner from running (Romania), you can ban your opponents from ever running again (Hungary), you can threaten to ban the main opposition party and subject it to relentless investigations by the secret police (Germany), you can threaten a ban on the leading presidential candidate and make them wear an ankle monitor (France), every member of your circle can be investigated for corruption (Spain), you can try and cancel local elections because you will lose them (Britain), and you can storm the constitutional court with riot police because you want to control it (Poland).
You can just do all these things. The secret is you just have to be on the right side of the European Commission.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Er zijn op deze wereld twee Palestijnse presidenten met een democratisch mandaat: Nayib Bukele van El Salvador en Nasry Asfura van Honduras.
Citaat van Nayib Bukele: "Het best wat het Palestijnse volk kan overkomen is dat Hamas volledig verdwijnt."
Houding van Nasry Asfura: Als eerste officiële daad ontving hij de Israëlische ambassadeur, en hij trok Honduras terug uit de groep landen die Israël diplomatiek willen isoleren.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
It's really disgusting that this hero has been air-brushed out of history. He should be invited to the White House. Clearly nobody told the President.
Snubbed local cop who neutralized would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks cut out of the narrative by embarrassed feds: family trib.al/FaxTVOs
Commenters: the story now is the cover-up. That is very much a live story. Who went along with Arday's lies and fraud?
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Two days after Henry died Hampshire Police secretly recorded Digwa in a police van speaking Punjabi to his brother. Digwa admitted stabbing Henry. Discussed claiming self defence. Made zero mention of racial abuse. Not one word.
Hampshire Police had that tape.
They knew Digwa was lying about the racist attack. They had the evidence. They had his own words and then tried to smear Henry as the aggressor anyway.
Three days after his death their statement read “it was reported two men had been assaulted by an unknown man.” Henry was the unknown man. The boy bleeding out on the street. They flipped it.
Family complained. Statement changed. Then police told the family their NEXT update would again infer Henry was the initial aggressor. His family had to fight them a second time. While grieving their murdered son.
Then during the trial Hampshire tried to issue a statement telling the public to stop talking about it online. Calling it disinformation. The CPS had to step in. Told them they were about to collapse their own murder case.
This is the force that handcuffed a dying boy. Missed the murder weapon twice. Had a secret tape proving the killer lied. And still tried to bury Henry's name.
That's not incompetence. That's a machine protecting itself. At the expense of a dead boy's reputation and three officers are still on active duty. Not suspended. Treated as witnesses. To their own actions.
Hampshire Police didn't just fail Henry on that street. They kept failing him for six months after he died.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
The list that @grok prepared of politically 'centrist' women writers includes Marilynne Robinson, who in 2024 gave an interview to the @nytimes in which she called then-President Joe Biden "a gift from God." She raved about his "competence" and "brilliance."🧐
There are few openly centrist women in mainstream literary fiction, which leans progressive overall. Political moderates would likely not view these as far-left: Lionel Shriver (critical of progressive excesses while remaining a Democrat), Anne Tyler (avoids partisan politics and has criticized cancel culture), Marilynne Robinson (Christian liberal focused on tradition and democracy), and Elizabeth Strout (empathetic chronicler of ordinary lives who notes divisions without radicalism). Open centrism remains rare in the field.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
here's you regular reminder that carseats have probably saved very few lives in aggregate vs. general improvements in road and care safety
despite massive increases in carseats for 0 & 3 year olds since 1959, their mortality declines have been entirely typical
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Jason Arday’s PhD Supervisor Recycled a Coauthored Chapter Into His Own Thesis and His Book
The man who oversaw Jason Arday’s doctorate now runs student experience at the university that cleared it, I report. His own PhD reused 2,000 words of a three-author chapter, unquoted and mostly uncited.
Amid the recent imbroglio over Jason Arday’s alleged plagiarism, academic fraud and serial fabulism, a quiet question has gone unanswered: Who were his academic advisors? And how did they neither catch on to, nor ultimately prevent, the evident flaws in his 2015 PhD thesis and other published scholarship?
During the weeks leading up to Dr. Arday’s resignation from his Cambridge University professorship and ultimate death in August, a source pointed me toward his thesis advisor at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), Philip Vickerman. In particular, my source said, I should examine whether there was textual overlap between Dr. Vickerman’s own PhD thesis at Leeds University and other published work.
I found plenty.
Dr. Vickerman’s 2004 thesis contains 37 clusters, comprising 2,010 words, that are identical to a book chapter, published in 2003, that he coauthored with two other people. None of the recycled passages in the thesis are in quotation marks and 30 of them bear no citation.
All 37 passages wound up, at least in part, in a 2007 book Dr. Vickerman published as an individual author. Thirty-six of those passages are largely intact. Just four cite the 2003 book chapter.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
I was in the military and worked in countries (and one in particular) with a Peace Corps presence. There were 5 Peace Corps Volunteers, likely a lot like her, that were raped in a single year in that country. The Peace Corps leadership would not allow that to be included in the safety briefing to newly arriving Volunteers.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Come as you are (with out disruption), sure.
Too many of us want to *stay* as we are.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Ya'll, this is nuts.
Hundreds - that's right, HUNDREDS - of armed robberies between 2022 and 2024 weren't real.
They were staged by the "victims" as part of a massive immigration fraud scheme to secure U-visas for themselves and their families.
cwbchicago.com/2026/10/buckt…
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.
The British turned him down.
So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.
It worked better than anyone could have imagined.
His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.
The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.
He didn't go to Britain.
He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.
Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.
He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.
The Germans loved him anyway.
Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.
The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.
Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.
Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.
When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.
Who also didn't exist.
Then came D-Day.
Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.
Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.
That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.
German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.
The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.
A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.
After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.
For decades the world thought he was dead.
In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.
Some of them thanked him.
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
乌克兰最好的结局，是成为下一个芬兰。
泽连斯基表示，可以接受冻结现有战线、保住75%以上国土的方案。
打了四年多，死了那么多人，最后还要失去大片土地，这算不算失败？
看看芬兰的历史。
1939年苏联进攻芬兰，芬兰拼死抵抗，最终割让约一成国土，40多万人被迫离开家园。
战后芬兰偿还巨额赔款，发展工业，逐渐成为欧洲富裕的发达国家。
韩国也一样。1953年停战后，半岛分裂延续至今，韩国却在几十年里实现了经济腾飞。
乌克兰如今面临的现实更加残酷。城市被毁，人口外流，年轻人不断走上战场，欧洲的援助也面临压力。
我认为，乌克兰真正的胜负，不在停火那一天，而在未来二三十年。
如果能获得可靠的安全保障，恢复经济，重建家园，剩下的75%依然可能发展成一个富裕国家。
怕就怕停火几年后，战争再次爆发。
如果你是乌克兰人，你会接受失去部分土地换取和平，还是继续打下去？
#UkraineRussiaWar️
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
I appreciate seeing a publication willing to take a closer look at the underlying facts rather than simply repeat these allegations.
This story will not withstand scrutiny. To date, no verifiable evidence has been presented to substantiate these false claims.
I hope others, including those commenting on X, will take the time to examine the facts before repeating these accusations. Credibility matters, and serious allegations deserve serious scrutiny.
My newest version of an old joke:
An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, a psychologist, a sociologist, an education professor, and a women's studies professor walk into a bar and someone offers to buy a drink for whoever has the best proof that all odd numbers greater than 1 are prime.
The engineer says, "3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, so all odd numbers are prime."
The physicist says: ‘3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, 9’s not a prime --hmmm, but let's go on---11's a prime, 13's a prime... It must be 9 was measurement error.
The mathematician says: "3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime. Therefore, by induction, all odd numbers are prime."
The psychologist says: "I told my R.A. our conjecture, and having rechecked his work after I scolded him for some preliminary miscalculations, he now reports that 3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, 9's a prime, 11's a prime, 13's a prime, 15's a prime, and so is every other odd number."
The sociologist says: "3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, 9's a prime,..."
The education professor says: "What's a prime number?"
The women's studies professor says: "Are you calling me odd?"
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
nytimes.com/2026/10/21/us/ch…
The article refers to "Christianity Today’s reputation as a staid voice of intellectual centrist evangelicalism." This implies falsely that "centrist evangelicalism" must be virulent NeverTrump despite the fact that the policies promoted by the Trump administration are infinitely more amenable to Evangelical interests than those of the Democrats.
Evangelicals voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers in 2024 so how can virulent opposition to Trump be defined as "centrist evangelical"? Centrist in relation to what? The hard-left New York Times? Even in relation to the entire nation--including atheists, agnostics, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and others--let's not forget that Trump won the election over Harris.
Political polls generally define "Evangelical" as self-identified white evangelicals or white born-again Protestants. Of these, 81-85% voted for Trump in 2024, while only 15–17% voted for Harris and less than 1-2% voted third party. In addition, roughly two-thirds of Hispanic Protestants voted for Trump. Data for Black Evangelicals is more sketchy; one poll indicated 23%, another 14%, voted for Trump.
Christianity Today is having to lay off or force resignations of over half its employees because CT has a leftward slant that values promoting illegal immigration more than it does opposing Trans Insanity, the "gay" agenda, and abortion and protecting freedoms of speech and religion for conservatives.
Its current CEO, Nicole Massie Martin, mourned Kamala Harris's loss and said so in a CT op-ed. She is/was a pastor at Kingdom Fellowship AME Church, a "woke" Georgia congregation that in Sept. 2024 invited "Rev." Raphael Warnock, hard-left Senator of Georgia (for whom promoting "gay" and "trans" immorality as well as abortion are virtual idols) to preach at the 9 am service, "where leadership praised and lauded him and all but begged their congregation to vote" for him. (Protestia).
Russell Moore was editor-in-chief from 2022-25, a TDS patient if there ever was one. Marvin Olasky, who replaced him, was also a TDS patient, as were CEOs and Editor-in-Chiefs before Moore, including Timothy Dalrymple and Mark Galli. Galli called for Trump's impeachment in 2019 (“Trump Should Be Removed from Office”).
In October 2016 Andy Crouch, then Christianity Today’s editorial director, wrote an editorial “Speak Truth to Trump” in which he chastised Evangelicals who supported Trump but not Evangelicals who supported Clinton. In 2020 then-president Timothy Dalrymple wrote a piece (“Why Evangelicals Disagree on the President”) in which he aligned himself with the “Church Remnant” critical of strong evangelical support for Trump. He argued that the alignment had advanced “the kingdoms of men but not the kingdom of God” and risked damaging Christian witness. In 2024 Russell Moore and Bonnie Kristian published pieces raising concerns about Trump’s character, integrity, and the costs of evangelical alignment with him. I also recall a puff piece praising Black Evangelical support for Harris.
A 2023 review of Federal Election Commission records (reported by The Daily Wire) found that between 2015 and 2022 nine Christianity Today employees made a total of 73 political donations. All 73 donations went to Democratic candidates or causes. This included then-President and CEO Timothy Dalrymple and other executives and editors (including donations to figures such as Elizabeth Warren and the Biden campaign). No records of Christianity Today executives donating to Republicans were found dating back to 1991 in the review.
Daniel Silliman, mentioned in the article, per Megan Basham "was among the CT staffers who donated exclusively to Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, until my Daily Wire report prompted CT to announce they would no longer allow staffers to make political donations." In a Jan. 7, 2025 post, I noted how Silliman's Jan. 5 article regarding the passing of NT scholar Richard Hays, who months before published a book with his OT prof son Christopher retracting his prior opposition to homosexual relations, provided an excessive apologia for Richard's change of heart being brought about by his so-called "commitment to the literary unity of Scripture."
CT is tanking because for decades it has adopted a political agenda that gives greater credence to leftist causes than evangelical concerns.
[The author of the NYT article, Ruth Graham, is no relation to Billy Graham and Ruth Bell Graham. She is a Wheaton grad who is herself a NeverTrumper.]
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
Joel Osteen Launches Line Of Pastoral Wear: 'Sheep's Clothing' buff.ly/5ZUVZo9
Professor Eric Rasmusen retweeted
On Father’s Day, a supermarket employee named Santino Burrola was fired after he recorded three men stealing approximately $500 worth of laundry detergent from a King Soopers grocery store in Colorado.
Burrola, a former military police officer, was alerted to a theft in progress at the store. His first instinct was to pull out his phone and record the incident.
He saw a man halfway out of the store with a food cart full of laundry detergents and scent boosters. As he walked out of the store, he saw the three thieves hurriedly loading up a black Chevy Trax.
One of them was opening the doors, another was throwing a basket full of items into the back seat, and the third was struggling to unload the full shopping cart.
In the viral video shared by the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Office, Burrola can be heard saying, “Really, bro, you got to resort to this? The economy isn’t that bad,”. He even joked with the men, saying, “Better gettin’ while the gettin’s good,”. The video shows the thieves having trouble getting into the vehicle as they attempted to flee the parking lot. This allowed Burrola to yank a sheet of foil covering the license plate.
After the men left the area, Burrola called the police and later shared the video on social media, which helped the investigators. The video was viewed 1.5 million times and was even shared by rapper Snoop Dogg.
Investigators have already identified and arrested the driver, Jorge Pantoja, 32, the man in the green shirt. Pantoja is currently in custody at the Adams County Detention Facility on unrelated felony charges.
When Burrola returned to the store for his next shift, he learned he had been suspended, and a week later was fired.
He sat down with the union rep and the store management, who recommended termination. Burrola stated that he didn’t break any rules or touch the thieves — all he was doing was trying to help the community.
Burrola expressed that he didn’t feel he overstepped boundaries as he didn’t physically touch the thieves or alter their shoplifting in any way. He just revealed the license plate to help the community to be aware, the police be aware and to help better catch them.
He hopes this incident will bring about changes to policy, giving power back to retail workers like himself.
