• I think travel in much of Europe will remain significantly restricted as Delta makes its way from UK/Portugal to mainland Europe.

• Nature – Mounting evidence suggests Sputnik COVID vaccine is safe and effective. But Europeans still not rushing to approve, with France being intransigent in particular. Seething over Sanofi failure?

• Aeroflot short worked out (if not spectacularly).

• EURO 2020. If I had to guess England would win, but it’s really a coin toss. I am glad that Denmark lost, they played dirty and deserved that penalty.

• Lewontin, he of the famous fallacy, RIP. Peter Frost’s obit.

• Nick Fuentes banned from Twitter. He was the closest thing the US has to a “genuine” opposition leader, a locus of normality in the zoo of tired MAGA grifters, WN oldfags, and Ziocon “hello fellow nationalist” types who otherwise make up the modern Alt Right. It’s instructive that the regime unpersoned him. And it continues to raise questions why Russia continues to tolerate Twitter and other Western social media, open tools of the American regime.

• Algemeiner – ‘The Entire World Grovels to the Jews’: Belarus Dictator Alexander Lukashenko in Antisemitic Outburst. Before the UR commentariat gets “excited”, I’d say this is just an observation by Lukashenko that Belorussian (and I’d also say Russian) meekness in advancing its own victimization narratives has made it more pliable to attacks by Western historical revisionists, a mistake that Jews didn’t make.

• Robin Hanson – Seeing ANYTHING Other Than Huge-Civ Is Bad News. “Katechon Hypothesis” vibes.

• Business Insider – Satellite images show China building what appears to be over 100 new silos for its nuclear missiles, analysts say.

• Mencius Moldbugman talks about the phenomenon of transparent bathrooms in 5 star hotels.

• CRYPTO. This week’s thoughts on crypto for those interested. Bull market crypto mc peak was $2.5T, world wealth is $418T this year = 0.6% of world wealth. Jan 2018 crypto market cap peak was $0.8T/320T = 0.25% of world wealth. In fairness, not at all bad increase, relative to virtually any other asset class, and there’s cause to think that whereas in 2018 people really went wild this year’s bull run was cut short by various FUDs.

Another thing to note is that Bitcoin dominance never receded to the extent it did in 2018 (I was sure this wouldn’t happen, hence missed the peak). Back then, altcoins were just $ETH and shitcoin “BTC killers.” Now, there are tons of altcoins that actually do things across #DeFi and Web 3.0; yet even so, Bitcoin fell less as a % of the total, and even a large part of the altcoin gains accrued to dog-themed shitcoins and fossil coins while some actually world-changing coins like Chainlink remained in the doldrums throughout the bull run. But perhaps it’s good that normies didn’t “get” things like Aave this run. It gives us one last opportunity for accumulation on the cheap.

Yesterday the Levada Center released a new poll on vaccines that tends to confirm my contention that Russia’s tawdry pace of vaccinations is not a result of supply constraints, but the banal fact that many Russians (including in older age groups) would simply rather catch Corona than get vaccinated.

The first observation is that the percentage of people saying they won’t get vaccinated has been steady at more than 50% of population despite half a year and counting of increasingly intense government pro-vaccination propaganda.

The people who are open to getting vaccinated are doing exactly just that. 19% say they have been, which is close to the 18% of official statistics. Unless there’s some cardinal change of views, this means that Russia’s final vaccination rate is probably capped at something like 40-50% (short of it being made mandatory – but that is unlikely to happen, 58% oppose that idea and so does Putin).

Note that this poll was conducted in 24-30 Jun, when the Delta wave was already in full swing and Moscow restaurants were ordered to require QR vaccination codes for entry.

This graph, however, is much more telling. In most countries, it is the elderly who are much more eager to get the vaccine, for obvious reasons. In Russia, these inter-generational differences are much more modest. Almost half of 55+ year olds simply don’t want to get vaccinated and that’s that. Amongst those who do, half already had been.

This is the main and really only reason why in Britain, where vaccination of the elderly is at 95%+, mortality is drastically lower than in Russia where interest from that demographic (and in general) was so feeble that age restrictions on Sputnik access were withdrawn a month after it became publicly available in January.

Moreover, contrary to claims made by pro-Western propagandists (including some in comments to this blog), pro-vaccination sentiments, at least as concerns Russian-made vaccines, are much stronger amongst Putin supporters.

Of those who approve of Putin, 22% are vaccinated and 31% intend to (=53% total), while 45% would not.

Of those who don’t approve of Putin, only 14% are vaccinated and 14% intend to (=28% total), while 71% would not.

This is partially explainable by the age effect because younger people are more anti-Putin and also more anti-vaccination. However, since the difference between ideology is much stronger than the difference between age groups, this can’t be the main explanation.

Unsurprising. But worth keeping in mind, considering liberal/pro-Navalny elites’ belated attempts to pin the anti-vaxxer label onto Putinists, after having themselves engaged in bitter anti-Sputnik propaganda in service of their foreign sponsors several months ago.

А кто-то уже делал исследование – антипрививочники, хейтеры BLM из России и свидетели того, что "с Навальным что-то не так" – это полностью пересекающиеся множества или так, процентов на 90?

— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) June 17, 2021

I suppose a silver lining here is that mortality should become increasingly loaded against Putin opponents, many of whom evidently conflate their opinion with him and on anything made in Russia, and would rather get a foreign synthesized virus than take a Russian-made vaccine.

• Scott Alexander – Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies. First baby polygenetically screened born to a family with a history of breast cancer which wanted to reduce to reduce those chances. SA implies the client was a reader. Eventually it could be possible to do this for intelligence and other personality traits.

• Putin’s Q&A with Russia. I’ll have a separate short post about that.

• Artyom Lukin says China made strategic decision to replace US corn with Russian wheat (based on convo with Russian agribusiness specialist).

• BASED. Serbia’s Vucic stabs Drumpf in the back, reneging on the commitment to move his embassy to Jerusalem, also proclaims he “firmly believes that the Communist Party of China will continue leading the Chinese people to stride forward along the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

• As expected, US withdrawal from Afghanistan means China is sidling in. Plans for road to Pakistan.

• Brian Jacques’ Redwall children’s fantasy series (essentially, heroic mice and surdy badgers fight evil rats and wicked weasels) is being made into an animated series. Minor AK lore: I pretty much learned English from reading this series.

• /r/europe has Europe map of cash payments as % of transactions. Balkans not a surprise, but it’s curious how allergic the Germans are to going digital; or that Russia is more digital is more digital than Estonia.

• Robin Hanson – The Coming Cosmic Control Conflict. Basically, if his Grabby Aliens model is correct (e.g. isn’t constrained by Katechon Hypothesis or something similar), the possible conflicts that may occur along the borders of their expanding spheres of control could make for epic stories.

• Justin Murphy – Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy. (h/t MJ). The best introduction to urbit I’ve seen to date.

“If you think the stock price of woke politics is currently higher than it should be in equilibrium, then buying Urbit address space (i.e. Urbit “land”) is a way to bet on this belief.”

FWIW, I never bought the Moldbug association FUD. I don’t think it being loosely tied to an NRx thinker who has long distanced himself from the project will matter if it becomes attractive to use and people come there. Main risk is just that it’s outcompeted by some other solution, just like nobody now remembers Bebo. 95% of crypto-related smallcaps go to zero. Still, it’s one of the most solid projects out there, while I certainly don’t deign to give financial advice, picking up a star in the bear market might be an idea.

Another very good point here is that Big Tech sucks up a lot of human capital that could be more productively harnessed (just like the financial sector). Is Goolag really worth this? Relative to these misallocations, the energy costs of, say, running the Bitcoin network would appear trivial.

• Steve Sailer – New Racial Admixture and Cognitive Performance Study. Here is the paper:

Connor, G., & Pesta, B. J. (2021). Linear and partially linear models of behavioural trait variation using admixture regression. In bioRxiv (p. 2021.05.14.444173).

All the expected results for US Blacks, replicated yet again.

• Humorous but IMO accurate /pol/ explainer on what various lower IQ categories “mean” in practice.

• Center of Bitcoin mining is moving away from China (to Kazakhstan, mostly, as I gather). It’s curious how few mention that this removes one of the big FUDs against Bitcoin.

https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1395946341059252224

• IT’S COMING HOME? Not much into football. But my guess is that Italy beats Spain, England beats Denmark, and England beats Italy.

Haha, any of you still remember that meme? It was admittedly some very good hopium from Audacious Epigone at the time. (Belated RIP to his blog).

But over time it became clear that the idea that zoomers were radically more “based” than previous generations was, at most, if not a complete myth – Richard Hanania mentioned that he couldn’t find anything about the methodology of the 2016 HS poll that supposedly had 81% of pupils voting for Trump – then at most a very temporary outburst of /pol/ meme-driven excitement that was soon confined back to its kennels by the Big Tech overlords and/or stamped out once they entered the universities. Subsequent polls have tended to show that zoomers are similar in outlook to millennials, and in fact more woke on some issues, such as personal pronouns and gender identities.

Well here’s a new poll to confirm that point (h/t Hanania).

That’s right, it seems like 46% of today’s College Republicans agree with CRT.

Moreover, so far as the woke Republican zoomers are concerned, their main difference from the Democrats is just that they want to pay less taxes while bombing more foreigners.

Nemets comments:

Anecdotally it seems right. At GOP meetings here the young people are supportive of most of the wokist pushes of 5 years ago, & only support GOP for tax cuts and militarism. Exceptions are the dwindling numbers of pious Christians.

Furthermore, a majority of students believe that the US history curriculum didn’t focus enough on race. As Hanania notes, “[it’s] clear that a vast majority either likes the current PC curriculum or wants it even more PC.”

Zoomer grugs reared on /pol/ and Big Brain “Facing Reality” readers might be “redpilled”, but so far as the normie majority is concerned CRT is part and parcel of Wokeism, the religion that has replaced Christianity for their generation.

And as such, like it or not, CRT is here to stay:

BREAKING: The nation's largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.

The argument that "critical race theory isn't in K-12 schools" is officially dead. pic.twitter.com/BMRDoAK0sA

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 3, 2021

The Alt Right, /pol/, HBD autists, “radical centrists”, and anti-Woke grifters all failed. It is the true intellectual titans such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo who have won the battle of ideas.

You will accept that, you will take the knee, you will acknowledge your white privilege, you will be happy.

• Press F for John McAfee. Even NBC acknowledged he was suicided (if briefly). Certainly a very colorful character.

• @BirthGauge with new table of preliminary TFR estimates for first few months of this year. Germany will have a higher TFR than the US for the first time in more than a century this year. Lyman Stone on what explains Czechia becoming what will probably be the highest TFR developed country (apart from Israel) in 2021. Mark Steyn on suicide watch.

• Von Stumm, S., & Plomin, R. (2021). Using DNA to predict intelligence. Intelligence, 86, 101530.

• MAGIC SOIL. Bukowski, P., Clark, G., Gáspár, A., & Peto, R. (2021). Social mobility and political regimes: intergenerational mobility in Hungary, 1949-2017. 67, 81 (h/t @devarbol). The elites of 18C Hungary largely preserved their positions under 20C Communist Hungary.

Guirkinger, C., Aldashev, G., Aldashev, A., & Fodor, M. (2020). Economic Persistence despite Adverse Policies: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan (No. 2020-39). ULB — Universite Libre de Bruxelles. https://ideas.repec.org/p/eca/wpaper/2013-312572.html (h/t @whyvert). Finds the same thing even for Kyrgyzstan: Richer and more powerful tribes had greater representation in 1970s Soviet elite.

• XENOS. Avi Loev – A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

• 2,034 nearby star-systems that could find Earth by observing it crossing the Sun.

• I did say Wokeism is literally White Supremacy… here is a another anecdote to that effect.

• Dark Fish. They apparently account for at least 50% of fish biomass.

• CRYPTO. My thoughts on the bear market this week. I appeared at Zadumov’s podcast, where I’m somewhat of a regular now, and had a little debate with a Bitcoin maxi (Russian language).

With gas prices low, I recommend content creators/brand owners to snap up an .eth domain. They are cheap but could become quite important come Web 3.0. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

• UKRAINE. Ukraine using $2B of its meager resources to buy British warships and kneeling for the honor… well, I suppose the UK’s provocation of Russia by sailing its destroyer through Crimean waters was not so surprising. The “lost” documents about that were obviously a leak. Meanwhile, China also forces Ukraine to kneel by (allegedly) threatening vaccine supplies if Kiev had insisted on keeping its name on the list of states condemning its actions in Xinjiang.

Israel proved more faithful to the US, though. Hanania: “US loves Muslim rights so much, it pressures Israel to criticize China. Because that’s where Israel can make a difference in giving Muslims rights, in Xinjiang.”

[Epistemic status: Low, I don’t know much about Afghanistan, nor does it interest me much (except for the fascination multiple empires seem to have in expending their treasure there].

There appears to be a near consensus that the Taliban will take over most of Afghanistan soon after the US withdrawal and that they will do this rather quickly.

Will the Taliban take over after the US leaves? If so, how long will it take them?

— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) April 15, 2021

This assessment would appear to be backed up by the takeover of multiple provincial centers by the Taliban, who had previously mainly stuck to the countryside, in recent days.

Even on paper, the two sides are more evenly matched than many expect, according to a recent report (h/t Vendetta):

A glance at commonly cited numbers would leave the impression that Afghanistan’s security forces far outnumber the Taliban, by as much as a factor of four or five (352,000 to 60,000). A more nuanced comparison, however, suggests a different story. Most estimates put the number of Taliban frontline fighters around 60,000. The comparable number of Afghan soldiers is about 96,000. The only detailed public estimate of the Taliban’s militia elements—its “holding” force—is around 90,000 individuals. The comparable government force is the police, which has about the same number of people (84,000) in the field. Thus, a purely military comparison of strength shows that the government’s fighting force is only about 1.5 times the strength of the Taliban’s, while the two sides’ holding forces are roughly equivalent.

The Afghan government forces have much more in the way of advanced tech, but they are too low IQ to use most of it effectively. So its value is limited and will plummet further once American advisors leave.

The Taliban believe in what they’re fighting for so their morale is much higher. Most ANDSF soldiers are in it for the paycheck. Corruption is rife and even those “elite” units (read: minimally combat-worthy) end up not getting promised support from other units, with the result that they end up falling into traps, getting massacred, and becoming demoralized themselves.

So on the face of it the situation for the central government in Kabul is bleak.

But will this mean that the Taliban takeover is guaranteed? No. At least, not all of Afghanistan.

The Taliban has traditionally been popular amongst Pashtuns. But they are only 42% of the population, while the Tajiks and Hazara are less enthusiastic about them and constitute 36%. This might be even more true today than a decade or two ago because the Taliban are reputed to have shifted a bit away from Islamic fundamentalism and more into the direction of Pashtun nationalism.

And indeed, check on the LiveUAMap of Afghanistan – a page that will grow in popularity in coming months – shows that virtually all the pins on the map denoting attacks occur in areas where Pashtuns are the majority.

This follows the classical trajectory of guerilla insurgencies against inept government forces in the Middle East/Central Asia. While they make excellent headway against government forces in areas where they have popular support, blending into the local population and enjoying an intelligence advantage, the going gets much harder once they leave those areas. (Hence, say, why Islamic State ultimately never had a chance of capturing Baghdad).

And even during the five years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there was the breakaway Northern Alliance in the Tajik north-east, as well as anti-Taliban guerilla movements in the Hazara and Aimak areas.

So my guess is that things will end up something like that this time too as opposed to any kind of unitary Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Almost all the Pashtun areas will revert to Taliban rule, where they have no already done so. But the “Northern Alliance” will reconstitute itself and will, at a minimum, retain control over the Tajik, Hazara, and Aimak majority areas.

The key question is whether the Taliban will be able to take control over Kabul.

I suspect it will, because another constant of Afghan history is that outsiders tend to insist on involving themselves. One exotic but not unimaginable scenario is that China takes over the US as a security provider. China has a more legitimate interest in Afghanistan than the US because it provides a direct land route to Iran, whose relations have blossomed in recent years culminating in the signing of a $400B deal this year. China as the world’s biggest construction-industrial complex will be in a position to build the roads, railways, and pipelines to actualize that connection. Possibly China will even help it take back the Pashtun areas, with the help of the technologies and practices used to pacify Xinjiang.

Russia enjoys good relations with the current Afghan government (minor footnote: It was one of the few governments to recognize Crimea). (Incidentally, yet another reason why the fake news about Russia paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers was so patently absurd). Iran was on the verge of invading Afghanistan a couple of times in the late 1990s. Both would be perfectly fine with such an arrangement.

This opens the rather amusing prospect of the US returning to tradition and supporting the Taliban in its liberation struggle against the Chicom oppressors and its Russian and Iranian lackeys in another decade. That is, after all, about how long it took the US to let bygones be bygones with Al Qaeda/Al Nusra.

The US has seized the domain names of Iranian state news agency Press TV. It also seized Al-Masirah, a website owned by the Houthis in Yemen (the people fighting Saudi Arabia), as well as dozens of other websites from countries as disperse as Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Nigeria whose common denominator was that they were owned by or connected to Shi’ite Islam.

Apart from displaying the Biden administration’s continuity with Trump-era policy on Iran – as in many other things, both as regards domestic and foreign policy – this also constitutes a pretty significant confirmation of the thesis that the era of the Open Internet is over and its bifurcation along national and civilizational lines is inevitable. Given these developments, is it wise even for the English language versions of the websites of the likes of RT and Xinhua to remain on .com domains?

But this won’t improve individual censorship-resistance (except, perhaps, to the extent that one can geopolitically leverage – but that carries its own risks and tradeoffs). For that you need decentralized DNS such as ENS, HNS, Unstoppable, Blockstack. Actually, on that note, with gas prices currently quite low, now might not be a bad time to snap up an ENS domain for the next few years or decades if you (1) have some Ethereum in your own wallet, and (2) are in the profession of producing “content”, especially if it is often of an edgy nature. “Squatting” and “domain sniping” isn’t yet a thing there but it probably will be once Web 3 takes off.

Kneeling before Anglo ambassadors seems to be becoming something of a Ukrainian military tradition.

Ukrainian army officer kneeling before the British ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons.

Traditionally, it was the recipient of a honorary sword for acts of valor who knelt. The only exceptions were when defeated parties knelt and presented their weapons to the victor.

Come to think of it, I suppose that’s not an inappropriate analogy.

Ukrainian general presenting a sabre to US Ambassador Tefft.

It’s pretty funny. The svidomy kneel to the Anglos. Who kneel to the Blacks.

The svidomy are begging their way into a foreign hierarchy at rock bottom and are not even getting paid for abasing themselves so. Very cringe to observe.

Prestigious.

• Putin-Biden summit in Geneva. No surprises to the upside or the downside (if you credited the theory that Biden wants to curtail the breakdown of US-Russian relations to slow down its drifting alliance with China). $150M in weapons aid to Ukraine canceled, on top of the dropping of sanctions against German companies involved in NS2 construction. Putin says that Biden is not demented after all. Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley are very sad.

• Paul Robinson’s take on it.

• Biden: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.” What would it be like?

• RUSSIAGATE IS ETERNAL.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1405256054745681924

• Also congrats to Hanania on his first Tucker Carlson appearance.

• Scott Alexander: Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration. Little here will be new to HBD people, but the arguments that the US selected for lower quality Jewish immigrants was a TIL for me.

• Paul Robinson (RT): With vaccines widely available in Russia, dying of Covid-19 has become optional. So why are so many intent on making that choice? Basically comports with my thesis that this is an anti-vaxxer problem, not a supply one, and in fact links to my post saying that “saying from corona in Russia has long been optional” (although noting that it is a “rather insensitive way of putting it”). Perhaps – but were those people sensitive about inconveniencing my life? Moscow is in a lockdown again thanks to them. Meanwhile, some Russians paying 10-20k rubles for fake vaccination certificates.

• One nice thing about Corona is that people built up nice financial cushions during the pandemic and this gives them leverage over employers who now want them back in the office. Many of them are giving their boss the finger. This is GOOD for both worker welfare & wider economic efficiency. Now imagine UBI, pumping that cushion, indefinitely.

• Will the Afghan government even last until the US completes its withdrawal?

• Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan make a bet on seeing aliens within their lifetimes.

• Out-SJWing the SJWs.

• Smithsonian: Tracing Alaska’s Russian Heritage (h/t AP)

• Peter Frost: Getting the message

• Steve Sailer: Last Men Standing: Charles Murray vs. Ibram X. Kendi

• Where will Bitcoin go? My guess is that we’ll have a double peak this year (as in this video). But it’s impossible to be sure, of course. I think a multi-year bear market is highly unlikely.

• Razib Khan writes about SJW infiltration in Nigeria.

We know the effects of Corona on mortality and GDP. As data trickles in, we are now getting an increasingly clear idea of its effects on fertility rates.

(via Twitter demographer @BirthGauge)

We generally see no large-scale effects from Corona. There were usually fertility shocks as the lockdowns first went into effect, but they were quickly smoothed over subsequent months.

That said, there are important regional differences, with Northern Europe actually seeing a substantial increase in fertility. The effects were most striking in Germany:

Covid baby boom in Germany: Births in March 2021 were 65,903, the highest number recorded in a March since 1998.

In Q1 2021, births so far are up 5.2% compared to Q1 2020.

— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 15, 2021

If this holds until the end of the year, total TFR for 2021 could be 1.61, the highest value since 1973. (And no, the increase was not driven by refugees). This year may in fact see German total number of births exceed Japan’s. And Iran’s.

Births in Iran in Jan-Apr 2021 around 8.4% down to the same period in 2020. If this holds until the end of the year, Iran's TFR will be 1.54 this year, down from 1.66 in 2020.

— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 7, 2021

There are two possible causes here. The proximate one is that generous social welfare policies and moderate lockdowns blunted the impact of the fertility fall in Northern Europe and soon it was outright reversed. However, another possible, longer-term cause that I would propose, and which is suggested by the fact that Germany is the only developed country (with the exception of the few city-states like Qatar) which had a higher TFR in 2020 than in 2021*, is that Germany’s now close to 50 years of low fertility have “pruned away” many of its genotypic anti-natalists while increasing the “breeder” proportion of the population:

If this is accurate, we may expect German TFR to continue climbing up. While French selection for breeders lasted much longer, the German one was more intense, given the extent of its fertility collapse from the 1970s (while France always remained reasonably close to replacement level rates).

In other news, Czechia this year might have the highest TFR in the developed world after Israel:

Births in Czechia in Q1 2021 were 27,200, that is 3.8% higher than in Q1 2020. If that Covid baby boomlet continues through the rest of the year, Czechia's TFR will be 1.80, the second highest among all developed countries after Israel.

— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 14, 2021

Czechia is a socially liberal country with the highest percentage of porn stars in Europe. This happens to have no bearing on fertility rates, to the consternation of right-wingers. It’s almost as if this doesn’t matter.

4.7% births fall in Japan this year so far.

Then again, Japan is steadily becoming the fertility “powerhouse” of East Asia – bearing in mind the steep declines observed in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and even Thailand, which is now down to a mere 1.15. (Reminder that everything in life is relative).

As the first East Asian country to undergo the demographic transition, it will also probably be the first one to emerge from it.

I have raised this issue in passing before. But demographic statistics from Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – which have seemingly defied trends towards fertility decrease in almost all the rest of the world – should at this point be treated with extreme skepticism (just like data from Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya in Russia).

A couple of resources on this topic.

• Kazakhstan: Казахстан: миллион «мертвых душ»? + stranger233 commentary
• Kyrgyzstan: Чудеса киргизской статистики

I might write up some of this in English sometime. But the gist of it is that births data are not tallying with population data and some cities are generating crazy and implausibly high TFR figures (e.g. Osh supposed had a TFR of 5.1 by 2019).

The Uzbek figures might ironically be more accurate, but the country is probably on the cusp of an Azeri-like sharp decline, as explained here.

The main socio-political consequence of this is that Russian nationalist trepidations about an unending reservoir of labor pouring in from Central Asia is increasingly divorced from reality. In actuality, large parts of Northern Kazakhstan seem set to remain majority ethnic Russian in perpetuity.

• h/t Annatar for this observation.