source: @Scott_Wiener on X San Francisco State Senator, Scott Weiner, probably gets the most hate from the Right of any California politician besides Gavin Newsom, and perhaps Nancy Pelosi. To conservatives, Scott Weiner epitomizes everything wrong with California liberalism. Some of the online hate targeted at him from the Right has anti-Semitic and homophobic undertones,... Read More

Just in case you thought the correlation between human capital and economic development was an artifice of the post-socialist world, here is a similar graph (R2=0.4273) for all the world's countries that have participated in the Math and Science portions of the PISA or TIMMS (8th grade) international standardized student assessments. The methodology is the... Read More

Just as with Russia, the Western media (beholden as it is to its power elite sponsors and anti-Rest ideology) peddles many tropes about China that cloud real understanding of this fascinating civilization-state. In the spirit of Sino Triumphalism, this is my attempt to set the record straight and overturn the lazy arguments used to dismiss,... Read More

It is now nearly 20 years since market reformers began liberalizing the economies of Eastern Europe, or as some smart-ass put it, trying to revive the fish in the centrally planned fish stews. These stews, cooked to diverse recipes from goulash socialism to Soviet "structural militarization", were subjected to a wide spectrum of overlapping treatments... Read More