- 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 the Leftist moral panic against eugenics has given ammunition anti-abortion activists, with apparently six states now banning women against abortion on the basis of congenital disability. Interesting example of how an SJW – rightoid horseshoe, even in matters so small, helps usher us along towards Idiot’s Limbo with some combination of more disabled people, more restrictions on prenatal testing and genetic screening, a reduction in reproductive rights. Noah Carl notes most of the pointing and sputtering it generated came from left-wing progressives.
- Mark Galeotti – Kremlin Looks to Establish a ‘Techno-Authoritarian’ Power Vertical 2.0. Seems like a move in the Chinese direction of digitalized, indices-based control over regional governance (along the lines of Mishustin’s reforms of the tax sector).
- Steve Sailer on new FBI stats showing a 29% rise in murders in 2020. Incidentally, the gap between the US and Russia is now possibly larger than at any time since the Revolution.
- The Guardian lumps Steve in with Jeffrey Epstein. #AJAB
- Paul Robinson covers a report which calculates that the incidence of Russian military interventions abroad under Putin has actually declined relative to the Yeltsin era.
* Silventoinen, K. et al.(2020). Genetic and environmental variation in educational attainment: an individual-based analysis of 28 twin cohorts. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 12681. (h/t Steve Sailer). Contra Herrnstein/Murray, the heritability of educational attainment may have actually declined during the second half of 20C. Was the idyllic (to some?) picture of old time America in which people who marry across cognitive barriers a mirage?
- Robert Stark: Why the new “Populist” GOP is the worst of both worlds