I wrote about Woke Capital making inroads into Russia after Netherlands HQ’ed Yandex.Taxi fired a driver who refused service to a rude Black foreign student last year. However, not all such corporate attempts to signal fealty to progressive values are paying off. Vkusvill is a nice chain of grocery stores that are somewhere in between […]

According to the CDC the US had a homicide total of 24,692 in 2020, an increase of 5,551 compared to 2019. That's 29% more homicides, with the majority happening after a spike that coincided with the riots protesting the death of George Floyd pic.twitter.com/nrlo5zvvyN — Forest Dweller (@yukatapangolin) July 7, 2021 This translates to a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

[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 […]