The rumors that Roman Protasevich was associated with the Azov Battalion, a Neo-Nazi regiment incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, came off as too perfect of a “pro-Kremlin” caricature for me to initially put much faith in them. But over the past couple of days it has been more or less confirmed that those initial reports, […]

The US and EU governments are accusing Belarus of “state terrorism” for forcing a RyanAir flight containing Roman Protasevich, an anti-Lukashenko activist, to make an emergency landing after a bomb hoax. He participated in the Euromaidan, although other reports that he worked as a press secretary for the Azov Battalion in the subsequent Donbass War […]

Within countries, anti-vaxxer sentiment tends to fall with rising IQ (e.g. white males with no degree see no difference in risk between contracting COVID-19 and getting vaxxed, barely higher than the numbers for Blacks and Hispanics, while Whites with a degree give the factually correct answer). However, between countries, there seems to be no such correlation. If […]

Results of the 2020 Census have been released. Some links: Reuters summary Chinese state statistics service communique (in Chinese) Here’s a table of the regional change: 2020 2010 % Beijing 21893095 19612368 0.12 Tianjin 13866009 12938224 0.07 Hebei 74610235 71854202 0.04 Shanxi 34915616 35712111 -0.02 Inner Mongolia 24049155 24706321 -0.03 Liaoning 42591407 43746323 -0.03 Jilin […]

I visited the Central Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, just slightly less than a year after its consecration. It is quite rare that reality exceeds visual media. But the Fortress-Monastery does so, in spades, and that despite its already superlative neo-Byzantine steampunk aesthetics on screen, which are like something out of a Maxim Bedulenko […]

Egor Ligachev, leader of the “conservative” wing of the CPSU under Gorbachev, died yesterday at the age of 100. He was a teetotaller who took good care of his health. The cause of death was bilateral pneumonia, though his son says it wasn’t COVID-19. By all accounts, he was a decent and uncorrupt man, e.g. […]

This week’s Open Thread. ~ Emil Kirkegaard – Meta-compilation of HBD related materials. Very useful link. Also dug up this Blast from the Past: Who’s afraid of the big bad data? ~ NEW PAPER. Rieger, M. O., Wang, M., & Hens, T. (2021). Universal time preference. PloS One, 16(2), e0245692. (h/t @whyvert) ~ XENOS. Pop Mech: Scientists Believe […]

This is Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s assessment of global excess mortality from COVID-19 from the beginning until May 3, 2021. (h/t Ron Unz) You can read about the methodology here. All in all, this sadly comports with the “millions” prediction I made in February 24, 2020. While at the end of last year I […]

You missed the Big Tech explosion because you didn’t understand what de facto monopolies wedded to economies of scale can do. You have been deplatformed by Zuck and @jack for being a racist and a white supremacist, and you don’t even have their stonks for consolation. You didn’t hop aboard the Tesla train because you thought it […]

  ~ Fake News. Final unraveling of the Russian Bounties “story.” As I said from the beginning, if you believe that the Taliban need Russian rubles to kill Americans, you’re either a neocon or a moron. Glenn Greenwald on this topic. ~ Scott Alexander – Prospectus On Próspera. Think of the flies. (Or, why I’m not a […]