In recent years there has been an obsession that China’s economic data is ‘fake’. A March 7, 2019, Brookings article, which went viral, A forensic examination of China’s national accounts, estimates that China’s GDP growth from 2008-2016 is 1.7 percentage points lower than the official numbers. In a 2013 article by Foreign Policy, Lies, Damned… Continue reading China’s ‘Fake’ Economic Data: Why I’m Not Concerned

Ross Douthat is nostalgic for the ’90s, in a viral article, writing: But as a statement about generational experiences, Alter was basically right. If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles… Continue reading The ’90s and now, part 1

Given that the charges against Julian Assange don’t mention espionage, Russia, or 2016, and that all he did was ‘aid’ in hacking (in agreeing to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense), it’s not even clear what, if any laws, were broken. A lot of people are speculating if… Continue reading Julian Assange

Predicting the Future An astute reader may notice that although “by 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power,” almost seventy years later, America is still number one. After a huge boom in the 70’s and 80’s, by 1990 Japan’s economy entered a prolonged recession and fell behind China and Germany, where it has… Continue reading On the Difficulty of Predicting the Future

View this post on Instagram So begins little Benji’s attempt to get Trump out of office A post shared by MILO (@milo.yiannopoulos) on Apr 8, 2019 at 10:37am PDT Milo is trying to signal how he’s more ‘right-wing than thou’, but all he’s showing is his obsolescence as a public figure who is fading from… Continue reading The Downfall of Milo and the Rise of the Alt-Middle/Center

The Quillette article In Defense of Scientism generated significant disagreement in the comments. Articles on Quillette about social-justice and politics-related topics get much less criticism than the above example. The authors erred by venturing into philosophy, but why do people care so much? Philosophy is difficult subject that does not take kindly to dilettantes. If… Continue reading The trouble with philosophy

Trump administration nearly doubles H-2B guest visa program, which brings many Mexican workers: Even left-wing publication The Mercury News is calling Trump out for being a sell-out: “It’s ironic that Trump is demagoguing and railing against a so-called dangerous and scary flood of migrants and caravans from Mexico and Central America, and even threatening to… Continue reading Trump administration nearly doubles H-2B guest visa program

There is a common argument by the left that the admissions process for New York’s nine specialized public schools, which requires that eighth and ninth grade students score high enough on the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), discriminates against blacks. From Quillette What New York’s Public Schools Could Learn From Stuyvesant Stuyvesant’s cutoff is… Continue reading New York elite public schools are not discriminating against blacks

From Roosh V Forum , Trump is going to wait until after 2020 to do anything about healthcare. He had a technical majority for two fucking years.   Now, they are just getting around to “developing” a plan and won’t even make a push for it until after maybe the 2020 elections?   “Developing” my… Continue reading Is MAGA over? It feels like it

From Bloomberg The Welfare Debate the U.S. Should Be Having: What does society owe those who are “unwilling to work,” and what do they owe their communities?: But the shift in thinking about safety-net policies primarily as tools to help low-income Americans get and keep jobs is not as straightforward as it seems. Some people… Continue reading The right’s embrace the anti-work movement