It’s very refreshing to see people who actually know what they are talking about:

Though huge numbers of Russians (75 percent) claim to be Orthodox, only a tiny number of them (four percent) actually go to church. Of those who claim Orthodoxy as their religion, 30 percent don’t even believe in God.

Judging by the glee with which the denizens of the Russian Empire destroyed churches and murdered priests back in 1917 and in the first decades of the USSR, there wasn’t much religiosity in those regions even before the Revolution. And in the century that passed since then, people have lost all interest or need in practicing the extremely demanding and complex Orthodox Christianity.

The other day, I spoke to this missionary preacher fellow from Iowa who had spent some time in Russia and who tried to convince me that Russian people were massively religious. When I told him it was not true, he accused me of badmouthing Russians to make Ukrainians look better. As happy as I always am to badmouth Russians, I had to explain that there was zero difference in terms of religiousness between Ukrainians and Russians, and I consider this to be a great thing.

So who has heard or read Hillary Clinton’s New York speech? I have and was quite surprised at the heavy dose of populism she has injected into her talking points since her 2008 campaign. See the following, for instance:

While many of you are working multiple jobs to make ends meet, you see the top 25 hedge fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often paying a lower tax rate.

I’m not a fan of this kind of empty rhetoric (to put it very mildly) but I know that the statement will resonate with the more simple-minded among us.

The part of the speech that I did like was the very careful recognition that the economic problems of today are caused by the erosion of the nation-state:

Advances in technology and the rise of global trade have created whole new areas of economic activity and opened new markets for our exports, but they have also displaced jobs and undercut wages for millions of Americans.

This is, of course, a lot more careful than what Bill Clinton is allowing himself to say. But he’s not running for president, so he can afford do be more explicit. Nobody who is hoping to have a career in politics can afford to break to the voting public the news that there is no way we are going back to the times when Hillary’s grandfather went to work “in the same Scranton lace mill every day for 50 years.”

The following part was also useful:

Now, we can blame historic forces beyond our control for some of this, but the choices we’ve made as a nation, leaders and citizens alike, have also played a big role.

The plan is clear: recognize the erosion of the nation-state and make efforts to retain some of its power to provide for the welfare of the citizens. And the best part of the speech, I believe, was the following:

Now, there may be some new voices in the presidential Republican choir, but they’re all singing the same old song…

A song called “Yesterday.”

It’s true. There is absolutely nothing in the past that can help us move into an entirely new state form that is taking shape today.

And, of course, I was extremely pleased by the psychoanalytic part of the speech:

Research tells us how much early learning in the first five years of life can impact lifelong success. In fact, 80 percent of the brain is developed by age three.

This is really cool. We cannot move towards the future successfully if we retain the antediluvian ideas of the pre-industrial revolution times.

Hillary is not a charismatic leader (nobody in US politics is, and that’s a huge blessing) but she’s doing all she can to present as at least a little bit charismatic. She will never manage to go as far down that road as Obama but she’s doing a lot with what she has.

A buddy of mine from grad school back at McGill University (located in Canada, by the way, which is crucial to the story) is expecting a baby. He and his wife are in their forties, so they are doing a panel of genetic tests in the early stage of pregnancy for obvious reasons.

Of course, they are doing the tests at a private clinic and paying a huge sum of money for them because the tests are time-sensitive, again, for obvious reasons.

After they had the tests done, they were told they’d have to wait for several weeks for the results. For obvious reasons, one prefers to get the results of these tests as early as possible.

But the clinic explains that the tests can only be conducted in. . . California. So the blood and saliva sample my buddy and his wife submitted are being shipped all the way from Montreal to California and back. This means that the samples will be stuck at the customs, for obvious reasons.

What is not immediately obvious is why California is the closest place where tests can be conducted. 

So how does everybody feel about the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal?

Do we try to retain the nation-state to some degree or do we kick it right in the shins?

Fascinating stuff.