Polished Stories For Kristof

“If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?”
-Polish saying Confirms that Jozef and Kristof Were Good Men - To boot, we read Freud in order to understand women

Two centuries ago, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

 ...We Are Never Too Old for Anything ;~)

Don’t take a selfie with a Polish bison

One billion earths in our galaxy alone?

Slavs imitated much of their culture using the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this isanam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. Soanam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.” The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship.



After Joseph Stalin's ill-defined borders - Iron Curtain

The depth of Slavic history as evidenced by a new paper by Buggle and Nafziger (pdf):

This paper examines the long-run consequences of serfdom in the countries of the former Russian Empire. We combine novel data measuring the intensity of labor coercion on the district level in 1861 with several intermediate and present-day outcomes. Our results show that past serfdom goes along with lower economic well-being today. We apply an instrumental variable strategy that exploits the transfer of serfs on monastic lands in 1764 to establish a causal link between past serfdom and current economic development. Tracking the evolution of city populations throughout Soviet times corroborates the finding of persistent economic differences. 

Is the czech vinyl bubble sustainable?

…I’d transformed myself little by little into the person who bears my name. And I ended up being my name. All you have to do is see the initials J. I. in the leather of my suitcases, and there I am at Orloj

The median price for someone’s identity was $21.35. Even Cieslak's?

William MacAskill is that rare beast, a hard-headed, soft-hearted proponent of saving the world. His excellent new book, Doing Good Better, is a primer on the effective altruism movement.

Everyone wants to find a version of history under which all the problems of the Eurozone are Germany’s fault, because everyone knows that all the solutions involve Germany paying. But it’s not really true; Germany spent the early years of ERM/EMU paying far more than anyone else was prepared to in order to smooth the adjustment path for the former Communist states. And after fifty years of structuring everything in Europe to prevent German hegemony, is it really a big surprise that Germany isn’t well set up to act as a hegemon? Imagine if the USA had lost the war in the Pacific and was today being blamed for its failure to ensure the economic development of the Phillippines.

 by Daniel Davies...

Machiavelli was brilliant, ruthless, cunning, clear-eyed, mercurial, a little boastful, and pathetic. But a comedian? Bohemian Joker