Deep thoughts

The Winning Mindest Wins. Everybody Loses.

Conservatives love to ascribe laziness to large swaths of the population. They think the prudent thing to do is to give the lazy moochers a kick in the butt. A kick in the butt to do what? People who are unemployed are not lazy, contrary to a widespread conservative belief. The mistake, or rather the convenient excuse, of the libertarians/conservatives is that they apply their own abilities and their own career trajectory to all the others. They think “if I can do it, so can anyone.” This is the fork in the road, this is the basis of all other aspects of their political philosophy: low-taxes on the rich, ripping of the safety net, worshipping of self-reliance, as if there are no children, single mothers, elderly and the disabled in this world – only white frat-boys, stomping the ground in their bullpen, eager for a race. “Let the best one win!” they yell, knowing full well, even before the race started, that they are the best. Wouldn’t you want to participate in the race if you knew in advance that you’re going to win? And then, they attach philosophy to their own abilities. Then, after they won, they create a narrative that they won fair and square, missing the fact that their skill is the result of their current proximity to the trough, not the way they got there. This is the idea behind “Trading Places” – it doesn’t take a special pedigree to be a trader. One just needs a platform and a nice suit. But still, they pontificate about their scrappy childhood and the bootstraps and hard work and risk-taking and wallow in their own narcissism, followed by a humble-brag “I’m just a regular guy” mandatory display of modesty. Is then there’s any surprise that people like Tom Perkins think only the winners should be allowed to vote? They think that it’s validated by them winning the race.

If you view society as a competitive construct, as many social Darwinists do, then it is a natural conclusion: The winner gets to claim the prize and to write rules and history books. Thus the pitting of citizens one against the other at the altar of “competitiveness” is a normal course of events. The suckers lost, too bad. That’s just life. And that would be fine, too, if only the winners knew moderation. Here, the winners would be wise to stop and take, or rather give the suckers, a breather. But the winning mindset and moderation do not go together. The game is in full swing, we can’t just stand up and leave. If we don’t take that last stack from the sucker at the table then someone else will. It’s just the cruel truth. Who can stop a train at full speed? We would rather just jump on the bandwagon.

And what or who can play the role of a moderating hand at this point? Where is that ‘invisible hand” that restores the balance, applies breaks to a runaway train? Where is the mitigating factor of supply and demand, the efficient markets, the equilibrium that we learned about in Econ 101? There’s no push and pull, no regression to the mean. The “pull” is nonexistent, or has been sidelined, or denied meaningful levers. The classic argument is that if the customers don’t like the product they will stop consuming it or go to another provider. But what if, at this point, the product that we’re talking about is a bare minimum of food, shelter and basic health care? Are those customers really in the position to dictate anything, to refuse to buy food, to refuse to pay rent? Where the hell are they gonna go, what the fuck are they gonna eat?

The train won’t stop on its own. It can either crash into a wall or go off a cliff. The winners will be playing musical chairs till the very end, because they will always think to themselves: “I can get out just in time. I’m the winner.”

 

The Failure of the Elites.

“Elites, by definition, are often brilliant and attractive-looking people who, because of their own sophistication and social confidence, welcome cosmopolitanism in all its aspects. For they are never insecure in the midst of exotic environments. But most people in this world are not brilliant, not terribly attractive and therefore not confident. Their lives are full of struggle. So they naturally take refuge in family, community, religion or some form of solidarity group. And in an era when mass communication technologies foster a vulgarized assault on traditional values — whether directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly — the sense of alienation among the masses intensifies, leading them deeper into such exclusivist beliefs.”

This is the quote from this article that I couldn’t get out of my head for days. You can apply the points made in this article to pretty much all global political events that happen today, including Ukraine. I find Ukraine events to be a symptom of other, more global geopolitical shifts. Today, I’d like to explore one of the reasons for this global turmoil. It’s the failure of the elites.

It doesn’t really matter if the elites are liberal or conservative. No matter how open-minded they consider themselves they still remain isolated from and thus blind to the real world. They ask themselves: “Why can’t others be like us?” To which they quickly find an answer: “Why! Of course they can, if only they do X, Y and Z! And we should encourage them to do that.” That’s how they fashion themselves into benevolent citizens of the world. But no one mentions that to become like them you have to be born a Romney, have rhetorical talents and political prowess of Clinton, the looks of Gwyneth Paltrow or the money of Arianna Huffington or simply be at the right place at the right time. This blindness is stunning. Maybe the elites are more concerned about appearing like they care rather than actually caring? All these bullshit self-help and spirituality and new age crap books just confirm my hypothesis. “Look at me, I’m so spiritual and so successful, I found balance and wisdom and so can you.” I mean, seriously, Arianna’s recent cause is “mindfulness and spirituality”; Gwyneth is now a lifestyle guru who hands out diet and lifestyle advice on her blog. But let’s think of who is their target audience? Is it their own fellow elites? But that would make them look “elitist” – a label they surely would reject. Or is it the rest, the rubes, the 99%? Here we are talking about people who commute hours to and from work, do some repetitive menial or administrative tasks, then go to a second shift just to make ends meet, counting pennies paycheck to paycheck. And you’re telling me in order to make their lives more fulfilled they should take yoga and spinning classes, eat tofu and try to get an afternoon nap? Or, as conservative elites prefer, they should go to church and get a kick in the butt that they need so bad to get off the couch? What the fuck?

I’m sure meditation helps to those who practice it. Having free time to practice mindfulness is a luxury that the middle-class doesn’t have. I’m not against people having spare time to sit and stare and meditate. In fact I do want the people to have as much free time as they need to become “spiritual”. But let’s face it: they don’t have the freaking time to do all that fancy shit. And let’s stop pretending that they can find that time, if only they could, you know, cut their working hours. Conservative elites for instance, like future presidential candidate Paul Ryan, believe that the rubes don’t work hard enough. So, I guess, cutting the workload is out of the question.

As a result, the poor and middle-class are trapped between “do yoga and meditate” and “work harder” messages coming from both sides of the political aisle. And the elites are upset that those unwashed show some unwanted tendencies like being too religious, or too lazy or too dumb to follow politics? That’s where the elites are stunningly detached. The problem is that, the other 99% are not as successful and beautiful and shrewd as the ones on top of the hierarchy. The elites, perhaps genuinely, want those at the bottom to break out of their circumstances, probably because many of the elites did it themselves, thus awarding ordinary people qualities they don’t have. Every time someone like Sam Zell or Sheldon Adelson goes on TV and delivers us a sermon on his scrappy childhood and pulling themselves by the bootstraps and how anyone can do it – that’s where it all breaks down. No, not anyone can do it. It takes a special person in a propitious situation at the right time with the right amount of resources. It also takes some noblesse oblige from the elites. But let’s stop pretending that these days everyone can do it.

Thus the ordinary people seek refuge in other things, like their self-identity, or belonging to a group, or religion. And the elites can’t complain, don’t have the right to complain, about the unwashed rubes who just don’t understand things. It is the elite’s job to understand those things and to show prudency and statesmanship and restraint and to not fuck things up the way they did in the last few decades. And then the elites act surprised when these people don’t vote the way we want them to vote.

Ordinary people, like the elites, want to be and feel special. But when they are denied access to real political and economic resources and get offered yoga or some worthless business advice instead, the soil is rich for social break down and various nationalists, separatists’ and populists movements. When that happens, the elites will have no one to blame but themselves.

The Burden of the 1%.

BERNARD: But sometimes, Willy, it’s better for a man just to walk away.

WILLY: Walk away?

BERNARD: That’s right.

WILLY: But if you can’t walk away?

BERNARD: I guess that’s when it’s tough.

– Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Wealthy Manhattanites reel from dull predictability of highly structured lives.

There’s this magazine, Departures – a great read if you care about what’s on the 1% wish list. The magazine comes free if you have an American Express platinum card. If you don’t have an American Express platinum card, there’s a good chance you’ll find this magazine in a bathroom of your rich friend, right by the toilet seat. Open any random page and the amount of bullshit will blow your mind. “Are you still waking up to a traditional alarm clock and showering with ordinary municipal water? That’s so old school,” begins one article. You are in luck: The showers infused with vitamin C, lighting that optimizes your circadian rhythms and task-specific aromatherapy will soon be available to some lucky health-obsessed and, well, solvent Manhattan dwellers.

The burden of the 1% is lack of alpha and lack of adventure. If you represent a market niche for that vitamin shower but have read Hemingway in your youth, you sense that something is not quite right. You sense some hard-to-nail-down dissonance. As a former member of the 1% I know the feeling. I was there myself. Back in the day, when I was a mid-level Wall Street employee I wasn’t exactly lacking the thrills at work. Back then the volatility resembled a wild bronco. I had to clear 3-4 points bid-offer just to break even. That’ll keep you awake at night. I’m not complaining, after all I was well-paid. I’m just showing off my battle scars. To a Wall Streeter everything is a battle or a game, you know. Then, when you’re off work, your life is a sterilized and predictable routine: gym, healthy eating habits, domestic help. Eventually, this dichotomy – dirty combat at work/decontaminated existence outside – becomes mentally draining. If you’re able to block those creeping thoughts about the nature of your existence, you’re lucky. I wasn’t that lucky. Like many others, I’m sure, I looked for rationalizations: there must be some purpose in all of this, some meaning. But there was none. It’s just one of those bullshit jobs with a good payoff. We were not really funding any businesses or providing liquidity. I refuse to believe that those still employed in those areas don’t realize that – they are way too well-read and overeducated to not appreciate the predicament. So many are looking for some mental release, for a justification. Because we are good, dammit! We are all good people just doing our jobs.

When you’re used to your career trajectory moving up at a 45 degree (or steeper) angle, you are at a loss when it inevitably begins to flatten; you’ve groomed yourself for battle after all. Your built-up ambition doesn’t slow down in correlation with the diminishing opportunities. It doesn’t just disappear. And then what? At some point acquiring luxury items stops bringing satisfaction. At some point your life becomes about seeking the next thrill. Mine did. Like in some vile videogame you must move to the new level, new quest – this time searching for meaning, validation, benevolence or adventure. Adventure is hard to come by in Manhattan, unless you are a homeless drug addict or a street hooker or, well, poor. One can search for meaning on various charity boards, the other may find refuge in drugs or alcohol. I’m indifferent to most drugs; I’m partial to coke, but it makes my nose bleed. Marathons are pointless in my view. I consider charity – a common mental refuge of the successful – to be just a contrived display of benevolence, a self-promotion tool. I like gambling though. But my point is this: outlets for a real adventure are limited for the top 1%. But that pent-up demand – to be someone beyond the P&L, beyond the “number” – is palpable among the Wall Street/hedge fund crowd. They can’t sit quietly in the room and enjoy the spoils. They must do something. That desire is not necessarily bad, it just has nowhere to go. To exacerbate the problem, there’s no alpha today, no volatility. Hedge fund managers feel emasculated. They are basically reduced to extracting value from others, relying on insider tips, bullying everyone down the food chain and engaging in insurance scams. I guess that explains Bernanke hatred: he took away the hedge funds’ thrill rides. There are very few opportunities today to show the world what a top dog you are. And it sucks having to think of yourself as a swindler or a bully. Ask any credit trader to describe what he does for a living and more often than not you’ll hear self-deprecating: “Oh, I’m just a monkey pulling a lever,” followed by a sheepish giggle. The reason for this faux humility is that he himself knows that what he does is bullshit, a high-paying bullshit. You would never hear something like this from a doctor or a teacher.

That’s where pretentious bullshit comes in. It takes many forms. Sometimes it comes in the form of a fake adversity. The popularity of various races “for the cure”, marathons, charitable trips to Haiti, underground Wall Street fight clubs speak of that furtive need. All of a sudden, the 1% want to be regular folk, or at least find what they think is regular folks’ experience: physical challenges, dangerous situations, scarcity of resources. That credit trader fake display of modesty is often followed by a story about how they flew to Vegas with the guys for a weekend and got into a drunken fight in a nightclub. They seek adversity so that they can “overcome” it and then tell stories. But in our sterile Manhattan/Greenwich cocoon we are just grasping at straws. Local businesses got smart about those repressed desires: they structure their businesses to look like they serve a bunch of destitute laborers. Ralph Lauren store in West Village sells those Boardwalk Empire themed clothes that will make you look like you just came from a Depression era stock footage. Naturally those clothes cost a small fortune. Trendy restaurants must contain words like “farm”, “kitchen”, “shack” or “mission”. Or how about those cronut lines in Soho? People stand in line for 3 hours to get a freaking pastry! Those are not exactly working folk standing in line for a piece of bread. Why do they do that if not for that rare sense of accomplishment? Or have you tried to get into Momofuku Ko? You have to know a guy who knows a guy who can get you a reservation, but even then you won’t be able to find the freaking place. You’ll be going up and down the 1st avenue block trying to find the goddamn door. It makes for a good adversity story though. Going to Per Se or Daniel does not sound like much of an adventure. I guess in the end it’s not so much about the product as it is about the process.

That’s the cruel predicament that the 1% got themselves into. The well-off work hard to eliminate the chance, the spontaneity in their private lives and then spend enormous amounts of money trying to recreate it in a controlled environment. Nassim Taleb, the author of Black Swan and Antifragile, calls this kind of phenomenon “touristification”. Even their thrill seeking time will be planned and scheduled and will have a private guide. Even when you travel to, say, Cambodia, all you gonna end up doing is riding in an air-conditioned car, occasionally stopping in some indigent villages to take pseudo-National Geographic pictures of dirty barefoot kids. While tracking gorillas in Rwanda you’ll have an option to stay in the slums for a night and lend a helping hand to orphaned children. Or if you really want to immerse in the lives of destitute there is a new trend in luxury “shanty town” vacations. Options include a $26 tour of Cape Town where you can experience feces in plastic bags being thrown at you (without plastic bag is extra?). Think about stories you’ll be able to tell back at your desk and at cocktail parties! And yet, you’ll still feel restless.

There’s a cure for that restlessness. I hate to sound pious but you can become a better person for real. The only way to help the poor and the destitute is to stop doing what you’re doing. It’s not like you have to do it. Stop trying to devise new ways to extract value from the rubes. Stop charging public pension funds million dollar fees for some questionable services. Fuck HFT, fuck CDX IG! You are looking for excitements in all the wrong places: it’s a world of diminishing returns for as far as I can see. Take the money you already have and retire or find another line of work. Some are doing it already. Seriously. It’s unorthodox, I know. What’s that? Leaving the industry will prevent you from funding your philanthropic foundation that helps poor people? Perhaps when you stop fleecing people in the first place they won’t need your mercy after all. Stopping this bullshit is what really matters. Walking away from your line of work is the real adversity, the real-life adventure that you so desperately seek. Think of it as if you’re throwing the ring of power into the fires of Mordor.

I understand that for many it may be all too real. People have families, bills, lifestyles to maintain. One can’t just walk away from all of this unscathed. Oh, well. I guess that’s when it’s tough.

The Ability to Be Bad Is The Ultimate Gender Equalizer.

“Women are only good because they never had a chance to be bad”.

I saw “The Counselor” the other day, a movie based on the screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, the same guy who wrote No Country for Old Men and this post is a result of my ruminations on one of the film’s character. Spoiler alert: Cameron Diaz’s scheming and ruthless character kills Brad Pitt in an especially gruesome and chilling manner. For money – the most mundane and age-old reason of all. Some will find my thoughts and conclusions controversial. But here goes.

Women’s entire world, even when they are inclined to delude themselves about having some sort of power, revolved around the world of men. It’s the world built by men, with the rules written by men, so even when we think that we can achieve some sort of power, all we do is just play, real hard, by men’s rules. Sometimes we succeed, but those exceptions only confirm the rule. The bitchiness and cruelty that those of us who decide to wager into the man’s world develop is the manifestation and the confirmation of the man’s world. All this “Lean In” feminism that you keep hearing about is just a manual on how to be able to function in a man’s world. (A long, but dissecting and revealing account of what’s behind this movement.)

The ultimate gender equalizer is the ability to do evil. That includes the power to fleece the fools, to take advantage of the weak, to wage wars. True equality between sexes will be achieved not when a woman acquires access to tools of power she’s been denied for millennia; it will be achieved when she learns to lay them down after she’s had a good run. Women, especially at all those ubiquitous women’s conferences, like to think and talk of themselves as being better than men: we are nurturing, cooperative, benevolent, etc., etc. After all that uplifting talk women really begin to believe that they are better than those brutal apes, men. What bullshit! Women are only good because they never had a chance to be bad. It’s a feel-good fairy tale that women have been telling themselves for thousands of years just to cope with their second-class status. If you don’t have the power to do real shit then your only outlet in life, your only point of consolation is to “be nice”. When you are good out of weakness it doesn’t count, because you have no choice; you don’t get to pick a path, it’s been picked for you. How do you know if you’re truly a better part of humanity if you haven’t been exposed to and tempted with, at least not on a scale that men were, real power? Women think they are better than men because women never held that kind of power in reality – the power to do shit, not just depend on others to do shit. It is only during the last century we began to slowly shed those misconceptions. But here’s the kicker: once we, women, receive access to it, we are no different, no better no worse than men. That is a true equality – the ability to do things, sometimes despicable things, and only then the ability to abstain from doing them. Men had plenty of time to purge themselves of the bad things they were doing, to contemplate about their bad behavior; after all they’ve been doing bad things for a millennia. Men have had “fat tails” for generations (to use the statistical bell curve illustration): there are plenty of criminals, murderers, and vagabonds on the left-hand side of the curve among men; there are also a lot of geniuses and heroes on the right-hand side. Women’s bell curve looks much narrower: we don’t have as many delinquents and hobos, but we also don’t have as many outstanding statesmen and thinkers. We are new to this.

It is naïve to think that we can circumvent such natural evolution. First we have to have our own Raskolnikovs, Mussolinis, and Joe McCarthys in our midst; only then we can produce our own Rousseaus, our own Voltaires, our own Churchills. Only then we can sit by the fire, sip cognac and contemplate, in earnest, on the depravity of a human soul and our struggle to overcome it. Because then we will have a true understanding. Then we will know what it takes to lay down the power voluntarily, to refuse to use it to your advantage.

Benevolence and kindness of a woman had always carried a different flavor than a benevolence of a man. When a man is benevolent he projects strength; when a woman is benevolent she only does what is expected of her. A man doesn’t have to be benevolent; if he chooses to be it will come from his strength. If a woman is benevolent, she’s merely doing it because she’s weak.

Whether you like it or not, Margaret Thatcher waging war over Falklands was an essential part of that progress. That’s why we have to welcome even such cunts and dimwits as Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin – it’s progress; a hundred years ago they would just be voiceless housewives or spinsters. Having those public figures is natural growing pains. We despise them, but their existence is necessary to make way for future groundbreaking female leaders.

To achieve true equality we have to be bad first. We have to be bad for the next 2000 years. We will have to become the corrupt politicians, we will have to fleece the populace, to start wars, to fuck things up. We have to purge it all out of our system, to inoculate ourselves, so that later, hundreds or thousands of years from now, we can, this time genuinely, magnanimously, and without any social expectations, be good, show mercy. Then, we shall be truly equal.

What if a Personal Initiative is Destructive?

As I was translating that article, I realized how encompassing that idea of modern day feudalism is. If it’s everyone for himself, both politically and economically, what kind of freedom are we talking about?

Modern day GOP is a great example of such an ideology: Fuck everybody! If we don’t get what we want we just bomb everything. Because our idea of disruption matters just as much as the others’ idea of cooperation. Why shouldn’t it be awarded the same weight? We’re a democracy, after all. But what we get is a perpetual animosity.

It is declared that such multitude of voices will be mediated by a personal initiative, by economic progress. Well, Walter White (I’m still stunned after yesterday’s Breaking Bad episode) has a personal initiative when faced with his own mortality. In some sense, in a current predicament we’re all Walter Whites – left to own own devices, advised to fend for ourselves the best we can. Who is to say that a personal initiative will necessarily be constructive? What’s to stop us, when we’re pressed against an economic wall, from becoming our own little GOPs, from becoming metaphorical meth cooks? No matter – says the free market. It will be dealt with by an invisible hand of the market. If you’re bad you will perish. Really? Republicans have been behaving like little children for years and not only they’re expected to hold the House, some even think they will get hold of the Senate next year. If “democracy-free markets” construct rewards the initiative, it doesn’t exactly specify what kind of initiative. Malicious and destructive? Who cares, as long as it’s an initiative, as long as a person or an entity gets to act in its own interest.

Democracy in Flames (Part II)

The second part of this article is too meta, I had to look up some references and names.

But it’s too profound, nonetheless.

Part II

Democratic nomenclature doesn’t necessarily resemble socialist nomenclature of Brezhnev times, thoroughly described and rejected. The factory directors who became district party leaders – we all knew that nomenclature but that’s not what we’re talking about today. These are not textbook capitalists, exploiters of the working class – the way they are critiqued from the left. New democratic nomenclature only marginally represents the interest of the right, this ideology is not inherently right-wing. What’s important is that so-called left-wing views are represented in this new nomenclature together with the right-wing, and left-wing language is present in this new ideology as an ornament. Hannah Arendt does not contradict Ayn Rand, but sort of embellishes her; these two dames represent the new ideology with equal passion. Modern ideology – and this is important – is built with the use of so-called left discourse; it is based on the understanding of avant-garde that was carried by left-wing thinkers, it operates with notions of radical art; it has its own, non-classical, non-categorical philosophy; it has its own non-conservative values system. To accept this ideology as a whole – which is the only way to grasp this concept: Deyneka and Simonov can’t be separated from the brief history of Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) – one can be convinced that it is not a classical conservative doctrine. The values system of the new ideology is served by avant-garde, objectless art, leftist curators; and, technically left-wing Slavoj Zizek contributes for this new ideology in no less than technically right-wing Cheney and Rumsfeld: they are all in service of the new doctrine. The class system of the new order, created by the democratic markets, this new democratic nomenclature is a class of freedom lovers, proponents of personal freedom for all. The fact that its representatives turn out to be feudalists does not negate their progressive views – they believe in freedom and personal development. They don’t want to subjugate anybody, they just can’t do anything about it. Today the ideology of democratic nomenclature presents the most progressive teachings. The citizens got convinced that the presence of the rich feudalists symbolizes their own freedoms; many believed this, thousands of journalists prove this state of affairs every day. And the feudalists themselves believe that they sow goodwill.

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Democracy in Flames (Part I)

I’m so fascinated by this article that I decided to translate it in full.

Here’s part 1:

By Maxim Kantor.

We live in strange times, where there are many who are scared of the word “democracy”. It is impossible to bring a hundred cultures to the common denominator, but it very easy to start a worldwide fire. War today is the only order, the only desirable status quo for the democratic nomenclature. As such, the desirable result of war is not surrender of the enemy, but a continuous animosity.

A war is expected in acquiescence. It’s not about any specific reason in any specific country. If there’s no war in Syria, it will happen in some other place. Wars transcend boundaries with the same ease as capital. War transaction is executed as easy as a bank transaction, and it’s impossible to keep track of who gets the profits. It’s customary to say that the US gets the profits. But it’s a conditional fallacy. The wars of today are different – not the kind we read about in textbooks. And the benefits of these wars are different.

Absolutist conditions (armies adhering to conventional warfare) have long ceased to be observed. Napoleon wanted a duel, but received a dirty rout; but the goals of war remained the same – to win. Today the goals are different. The desideratum result of war is not victory over an enemy, but the continuous animosity.

Continue reading →

Democracy in Flames

It’s been a while since I read such a thorough and thoughtful critique of current political and social predicament. Unfortunately, it’s in Russian. But I will translate an especially poignant paragraph:

The peculiarity of our current historical fragment is that democracy equates itself with free market; today, democracy is dependent on competitive triumph of the strong over the weak. Democracy declares victory of success over failure as its achievement. Competition per se is not the problem: every participant, however strong, has a chance to win. But what makes these particular triumphs different, from, let’s say, the triumphs of Pericles, is that a society doesn’t win from the victories of the strong. The subject of Pericles’ democracy or Jeffersonian democracy was society, and not some particular outcome of a competition. Today’s society – is a stage for a free market; people are spectators at best, but rather a hindrance to the competition. In theory, democracy does not allow for the triumph of the strong over the weak: such triumph happens in the course of a competition; it is moderated by the rights of other citizens – the strong is dependent on society where he shares the responsibilities of citizenship. But the hybrid of the last decades – “democracy – free market” – cements the victory over the weak as something permanent, creates a caste of “super citizens”, the strongest players, citizens of global market – but not citizens of a particular society. The successful are automatically becoming powerful political force; and not in any given stand-alone country – since the market is not subject to boundaries. Banks’ CEOs, heads of corporations, owners of natural resources companies do not represent society; they don’t even represent their own capital – they represent the new formation, new democratic nomenclature.

I’ll file it under “deep thoughts”. For my Russian readers – a great long weekend read. Maybe I’ll translate more later. This needs to get bigger circulation.