Film Review: Wheel of Time S01

Wheel of Time: Season 1 (2022) ★

Rafe’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s world of eternal return keeps your eyes glued to the screen just on account of how utterly bad and cringe it is.

WAGMI: The %TOTAL Maximizer

Fictional short story in which an AI takes over the world by leveraging its financial dominance in the cryptocurrency space.

Moscow’s Pacification

Moscow’s homicide rate now lower than London’s.

Open Takes 1

Open Discussion thread.

The Last Reaction

Announcement of Departure from The Unz Review

The Wheel Turns, Ages Come and Go, And Thus Dies the Russian Reaction

Open Thread 167

In his latest newsletter, Adam Tooze points out that the Chinese government is asserting greater state control over the economy, including the power of Chinese business magnates to “cash out” of their holdings. In retrospect, this is perhaps the most logical explanation for the crypto crackdown. Diana Fleischman has a good article in Quillette on how […]

Russia’s Nationalist Turn

How Putin Created the Russian National State

In the capstone to my Russia watching career, I argue that late Putinism has adopted the Russian nationalist program near wholesale. Or so it seemed at the time…

China Isn’t Going to Make It

I have been a long-term China bull since I began blogging. Proof (2008). A lot of what the Western media was writing about China were based on Sinophobic fantasies that had no correlation with reality. Just to be clear, I am still a China bull, at least in the sense that I’m sure its GDP […]

Open Thread 166

🇷🇺💪🇮🇳 As usual, “real result” of United Russia would have been around 35% instead of 50% (and a simple majority instead of a Constitutional majority). But Western criticisms much less effective in the wake of analogous – if statistically implausible – claims about the 2020 US elections. EVERGRANDE. I was a China bull since I started […]

Megatsunami

There’s not much point worrying much over geological existential risks. They come too infrequently too be a major risk, and those that do occur more often, are not big enough to matter in the big picture. Still, if there’s one risk that is both potentially highly destructive and occurs at a relatively high rate, it […]