Thread on Libertarianism

1.
Libertarians are useful for one thing: highlighting government inefficiency. Other than that, they’re almost useless and have little to no understanding of human nature.

Thread on Invisible China: Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell's illuminating and scary deep dive into rural China's ills and stark inequality. No matter how bad you think it is, it's worse there---more like a developing country than a global superpower. 1/n

2/Rozelle rolled up his sleeves to understand the CN most only see from plane or train windows. Issues in health and education, bringing down human capital of 300m rural Chinese, could trap it in middle income status.

Think future like Mexico/Turkey now, not Korea/Taiwan

3/Most focus on impressive elite universities and high schools topping int'l rankings, but CN average education levels are abysmal.

Only 30% of China's working age pop completed high school--last place for all middle income countries, worse than many poor countries!

4/TIL a startling fact: school in CN through grade 9 became free & mandatory only in 2006! Even today high school is not free in CN! Want to go through grade 12? Pay fees of 10-15x incomes for poor rural areas. Instead they drop out to work unskilled jobs. Xi has promised to fix

5/No country has escaped middle income trap below 50% HS grad rates, and avg for successful countries (now high income) is 76%. Why? HS skills not important for repetitive assembly jobs, but w/o ability to learn & basic skills in math and reading, can't do more productive jobs

THREAD

1)
“Iranian Arms, Fighters Bolster Maduro Government in Venezuela, U.S. Says”

#Iran has a long history of meddling in #Venezuela with the U.S. in its crosshairs.

And Obama facilitated the mullahs’

2)
Iran has sent arms & dispatched paramilitary operatives to help Maduro remain in power.

“We see a growing Iranian influence in there,” said Adm. Craig Faller, head of the U.S. Southern Command, citing the “alarming & concerning” presence of IRGC Quds Force military personnel.

3)
“We’re concerned about what we see…It’s not just oil shipments, it’s arms shipments as well,” Adm. Craig Faller said. “We saw an uptick in that this year. We are watching the rate of change very carefully.”

More on Iran's malign role in South

4)
“… flotillas are often accompanied by Iranian naval vessels, including an intelligence ship that U.S. officials say has been used to transport missiles to Iranian proxies in the Middle East…”

More on Iran's gaining a dangerous foothold in the

5)
“Iran’s Mahan Air, an airline sanctioned by the U.S. for transporting men, money & arms for the terror-designated IRGC, has also restarted flights between the two

12 January 2020 #MAGAanalysis #EO13959

Did We Declare War Against China In November?

I was tagged on a video that's going round this morning. It's got our new, very strange friend Simon Parks, Charlie Ward, and a gal, don't know her last name, named Danielle.

In what was United Bengal (modern day West Bengal+Bangladesh) back in 1941, Muslims were 56% of the population, and today they are approximately about 67% of the population. If you go back to the early 20th century or the late 19th century, Muslims weren't even a majority.

This

example of Bengal is what has been happening across the whole of the Indian sub-continent, albeit at a slower or faster pace as the case may be region to region, but the fact remains that the change has been unidirectional= As time goes by, the proportion of Muslims increases in

a given region and the proportion of Hindus goes down. Project the numbers out into 50 or 60 years and you have multiple states/regions of India with a Muslim plurality or outright majority. Project the numbers out to a century or so and it's difficult to argue how Hindus can

maintain cultural/political dominance in the long run. Some people like to say, "Oh well so what. Numbers don't matter, what have you achieved at 80% of the population which you're going to achieve at 90%!".

This is faulty thinking, because the direction of change itself is

the demgoraphic sense is quite critical of whether you are expanding or retreating civilisation. The more people you have relative to the enemy, the more the chances that you will adamant about taking over more territory. The less people you have relative to the enemy, the more