The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld

We Confess Our Small Faults Only To Convince People We Have No Greater Ones

Rob Henderson extracts some of his favorite maxims from the collection.

And you thought I was cynical about human motivations?

Adoption Series

 The 2010 memories of the adoption from Romania in 2001.

5 More Short Links from 2010

 She Ain't Heavy, She's My Dachshund

 As The Backs Go Tearing By. My mother sang this at Central in the 40s, I sang it in the 60s & 70s. 

Bureaucratese of the Day

Tourist Site - Budapest.  click to enlarge

Tourist Site - Zurich   click

Remember to comment here and not at the 2010 link.

Fairfield Four

 

Vaccine Efficacy

 Neil Stone on X  

Sometimes vaccine efficacy is subtle.

Sometimes it isn't.

(Post 2500 -) The Free Market

Reposted From 2010

Conservatives, not just progressives, often fail to remember that free market principles are not something one applies to a society. They are like gravity, always present. Adam Smith's invisible hand was a description of how things work, not advocacy for how things should work. Market principles continued within communist regimes. Governments may ignore them or try to counteract them, but they remain. Ignore or fight against them too much, as in communism, and gravity eventually brings you to earth.

The free market is not the only operating force, of course. As with gravity, other forces can be brought to bear to harness it or hold it at bay for some purpose, such as throwing a stone or building an airplane. Affection, vengeance, drive for power, moral principles - all these can work to channel or oppose the self-interest mechanisms of the market. These are in fact necessary countervailing forces, as they are often the basis of long term "self-interest" in a broader sense. We like to have family and friends, we like to believe our lives have meaning, we give up resources to build systems of law and fairness to inhabit. Corruption - a type of self-interest that does not have regard for these other forces - can harness the free market to benefit the few, leaving only scraps of value outside the centers of power. The free market will continue to work in both places, whether on the scraps or among the cronies, but these circles will then operate independently.

Surprise After Surprise

Another podcast from someone smarter than me, being interviewed by someone who is also smarter than me.  My sidebar is full of such folks. (Not all.  Some just have topic specialties I enjoy.)

Steve Hsu has a Manifold episode which records his being interviewed by...someone. An anonymous tech person on the  Informtion Theory podcast: Adventures in Physics, Trump, and More. Steve is or was a liberal and was dean of research at Michigan State but has surprisingly good things to say about Trump and surprisingly negative ones to say about gov't research, especially NIH.  I didn't see either of those coming. 

Also AI, Miltech, and Balance of Power. Deepseek is a game-changer because it uses so much less energy; 6th generation Chinese fighter planes; America's chip advantage via Taiwan and Netherlands is not only narrowing, but the Chinese just smuggle in those chips if they really need to.  Not in quantity, but still very useful.

From the book club that David Foster and I are in one of the Silicon Valley guys passes along an article about AI coding, The 70% problem. Recommended. By him, I mean. Most of it is beyond me, but some of you like that stuff.  Have at it. 

Evangelicals and Ukraine...And AVI's Three Year Rule

There is widespread support for Trump's "rudeness and arrogance" to Zelenskiy, including some liberals who would rather not admit it.  But I think this will be less popular with evangelicals than his other moves. You will find some fringe fundies who approve of Putin because he is against gay marriage, but as a whole, evangelicals have had far more success evangelising in other places in Eastern Europe. Russia had a strong tradition of underground Baptists during the Soviet era (see One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), but when the Iron Curtain fell, a lot of the religious revival went straight to the Orthodox Church. Evangelical missionaries had great success in Romania, Ukraine, Slovak Republic, and Hungary.  Rather less in former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Baltic nations, and not well at all in Belarus and points east.

Many evangelical congregations have Romanians or Ukranians in them, have people who have gone on short term missions there, and support charities there. They have become very tied to the people of these nations, essentially ignoring their corrupt governments as a work in progress that will sort itself into western values...Someday. 

It has been 35 years since the Romanian revolution, and early on, Americans rooted for all the formerly communist nations to not fall prey to Russian expansionism.  If Iliescu was actually no better than Ceausescu, that was ignored because the danger was that it would go back.  That is still not outside the realm of possibility, and Moldova and the Baltic nations are on edge with what has happened in Ukraine. Yet it is progressively less likely that the Russians could do any such thing for the next decade or so. 

I have some parallels.  We resettled Laotian refugees in the 80s, and I boned up on that country's politics and people left behind, because I knew that the Syha's still cared about it. I haven't got a clue what is happening in Laos now, and frankly, I don't care. We worked with (South) Sudanese refugees not so many years ago and still have some connection. We were excited that South Sudan became independent in 2011 after horrifying persecution and oppression.

But of course, the South Sudanese were still capable of getting into wars between Dinka and Nuer over cattle.  What is up now?  I don't know. Maybe I should care, but I don't. As with Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Kosovo, etc, I don't even know who to pretend are the good guys. There have been Americans since the beginning who have insisted that the various factions in Ukraine are all so corrupt that we should have nothing to do with any of them, and they have receipts. Some liberals and libertarians, but a fair number of conservatives of paleo stripe have been beating out that rhythm on the drum for a few years, Putin or no.

For evangelicals who have to mix with liberals every day it has been something of a respite as well. They finally have something they can hold in common, rooting for Ukraine. Trump and Vance have seemed obnoxious, and most modern Christians of all sorts have a lot of the Gospel of Nice under the hood. Jeez, can't you guys take a hard line more quietly, without having to be rude about it?  

But now the full question is on the table, whether we like it or not: regardless of what happened before, What are we willing to do now? Russia invaded almost exactly three years ago, and I have long noted that Americans don't even like their own wars to go longer than three years, never mind anyone else's with our money. We will tolerate endless low-intensity warfare it seems, but not sharp hostilities. Billions, not millions of dollars have gone unaccounted for. My feelings are quite mixed at this point. As far as any war can be said to have started at a particular point, this one started in 2014. Two mostly-Russian provinces of Ukraine attempted to break away, and the Russians poured resources into them. The Ukrainians tried to prevent them. That still looks like Russian aggression, but you could stretch a point...

Feb 2022 invasion is unarguably Russian.

So what are my possible bad reasons for this uncertainty of position?  Am I being a typical American who just gets tired of hearing about a war and wants it to go away, whether we are winning, losing, or treading water? Am I seeing Ukraine as a Romanian equivalent and wanting them to prevail against Russians because I just always will?  Have I become increasingly isolationist because president after president has punched tar babies of countries? Do I just not want to hurt my wife's very pro-Ukraine feelings?  Am I becoming a MAGAhead, or reflexively disliking something because liberals like it?  Does Zelenskiy being an obvious arrogant prick about this sway me more than it should? I harp on all of us having buried and unattractive motives for our mostly-performative politics. Shouldn't I be especially alert to that here?

Accuse me of anything.  I might cop to it.