As much as it saddens me to say, it looks like we were right: online age verification is being used as a Trojan horse for the mass rollout of digital identity systems. Last Friday (July 25), the Starmer government took a historic step by making age verification checks mandatory for accessing pornography and other supposedly […]

Yves here. The implicit RFK, Jr. position is maddening. Yes, artificial food dyes are probably not good for health and should be eliminated. But how significant is the health cost of these food additives, which consumers intake at different levels, versus, say, pesticides, air pollution (mercury!) and other chemicals? The chemical intake burden is significantly

Yves here. Trump is such a chaos generator that it’s hard to keep up with all the damage he is trying to do. He’s in the process of completing his trade “deals.” Trump seems to have a crude hierarchy of punishment, with an official level of 15% being the least abusive and (so far) 50%

Following up on Jim’s post on the GDP release yesterday, looking at different aspects of economic activity: Quarterly Indicators First, ignoring the self-congratulatory remarks of CEA47, consider the level of GDP relative to the 2024H2 trend: Figure 1: GDP fm Q2 advance (bold black), GDPNow of 7/29 (light blue square), Bloomberg consensus as of 7/29

Syria, as a nation-state, did not exist until 1945, when it became a founding member of the United Nations. From 1920, following the fall of the Osmanlis, it had been under a French Mandate. Before that, modern Syria was an administrative division of the Osmanlis, within the larger Syria province, which included much of the

Anti-globalists and China bulls fiercely resist the idea that China can do much of any wrong. And China is certainly better led that the US and has had a simply extraordinary economic run. However, China’s leaders, from Xi Jinpeng on down, are admitting to something they had fiercely denied was happening: that China’s answer to