[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Biden and Putin will meet in Geneva on June 16. Speculation has been rife that Biden will try to draw Russia away from its deepening relationship with China. This makes patent sense – even American strategists have long realized that China isn’t just a much bigger Mexico, and in fact constitutes the one threat to […]

Is now the correct approach. I mean sure, many/most floomers are people with only a tenuous grasp on reality who don’t understand things like “excess mortality.” That said, with vaccines available now widely available across the First World – certainly to the age groups who are vastly more likely to die from Corona – it […]

The weak should fear the strong. Richard Hanania had a podcast with Sean McMeekin about his new book. (I made some comments on that post). Incidentally, I have started reading Stalin’s War. Not far in, but my initial impressions are that McMeekin is weak on military realism – he seems to think that Allied Lend-Lease […]

I don’t have the reputation of someone who stans for Russia’s record on dealing with Corona. I was writing about how Russian official statistics were massively understating Corona mortality more than a year ago, before Western journalists generally noticed it, and followed that theme up in the subsequent months. Ironically, Russia’s development of one of […]