Will to Power for my choices; Amor Fati for the outcome. Marine infantry vet. Tech professional. Lived in Japan. Musician. The Doberman handles strategy.
California, USA
Joined December 2008
- Tweets12.1K
- Following356
- Followers171
- Likes12.9K
Pinned Tweet
My Cold War strategy game has a Steam page!
The Long Telegram: Balance of Terror, Chapter I puts you in Washington or Moscow in 1946. Your advisers disagree. Your intelligence is uncertain. Every decision has a political cost.
Wishlist: store.steampowered.com/app/4…
This is true, and looking at it from an entropy perspective explains why. Far easier to create a new system suited to present circumstances than try to modify an existing system that has ossified to make it fit existing conditions.
Let it collapse.
We see this in every field, tech, business, politics.
One more reason to let the old order go. It died because it no longer can meet the needs of 2026. Must go all in on building a new order suited to now.
"You never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing." - @nntaleb
I was wrong when I said the biggest midterms loser was Vance. It’s the people who left California to escape the lefties.
Congrats, you still live in a blue state and have simply downgraded your weather and natural environment.🤣
The winning play is not to run away. Find a place that you love, plant roots there and work long-term to shape it.
That requires flexibility and pragmatism, a willingness to live with imperfection, setbacks and ambiguity, but nature rewards that strategy.
johnrfite.com/writing/trusti…
Voted down ballot GOP. I live in a conservative enclave in California, so my vote won't be wasted locally. In the end it's about exercising your will as a citizen. History says my side will lose this time. So it goes. The USA will continue to lead humanity into the future.
Looking more and more like a blue wave. Biggest loser: Vance. End of Maga? I held my nose and voted Harris in 2024 because Trump seemed so unhinged, but he had a long string of wins his first 2 years. Won me over.
That's done, he'll have to horse trade for everything he wants from here on in. He'll have more leeway on foreign affairs, so finishing Iran and flipping Cuba are still on the table.
But the circus will be wrapping up. He'll seem more and more irrelevant as the days pass. Hope you were entertained. We won't see the likes of Trump again in our lives. Whoever it is in 2028 and beyond will be living in the new order that emerges from the post-WW2 order that Trump finished off.
When I was studying Rothbard, Mises, and the rest of the AnCaps/libertarians about 20 years ago, I became familiar with the term "Ratchet Effect" whereby the state gains power from emergencies and never relinquishes it even after the emergency has passed.
I do believe that the power dynamic is changing, and other players and entities are diluting that power to different layers, as described in my essay The Sovereignty Stack. I've updated it with more explicit examples and diagrams showing this.
There is no such thing as a power vacuum for long, and state power (layer 1) lost is gained elsewhere (layers 2, 3 and 4).
johnrfite.com/writing/sovere…
I sometimes see Eastern Europeans and western idealists criticize Bush 1 for the "Chicken Kiev" speech in Ukraine in 1991. Painting him as weak and out of touch. Here's an excellent summary by Gemini putting it in context. Why Bush was right on foreign policy, yet again, and why we'd be in a much better place today if he had won in 1992 instead of the amateur from Arkansas:
The "Chicken Kiev" Myth vs. The Man Who Knew Where the Warheads Were
Today, every armchair hawk and Eastern European think-tanker loves to dunk on George H.W. Bush for walking into the Ukrainian parliament on August 1, 1991, and warning them against "suicidal nationalism." New York Times columnist William Safire christened it the "Chicken Kiev" speech, painting Bush as a timid, out-of-touch patrician who was scared of freedom and trying to prop up a dying Soviet dinosaur.
Crash Test Verdict: Calling Bush ’41 weak in August 1991 is how tourists talk when they’ve never had to read a daily nuclear intelligence brief.
Let’s look at the actual telemetry sitting on Bush and Brent Scowcroft’s desk on the morning of August 1, 1991:
The Yugoslavian Fire: Exactly five weeks earlier (June 25, 1991), Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from Yugoslavia, and the Balkans had instantly erupted into ethnic slaughter.
The Loose Nuke Nightmare: The Soviet Union wasn't Yugoslavia—it had 30,000 strategic and tactical nuclear warheads scattered across fifteen republics. Ukraine alone had 1,900 strategic ICBM/bomber warheads and over 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons sitting on its soil, with command-and-control cables running through Moscow.
The 48-Hour Signature: Two days before landing in Kiev (July 31, 1991), Bush had finally gotten Mikhail Gorbachev to sign the START I Treaty in Moscow, slashing strategic arsenals for the first time in history.
Bush didn't give that speech in Kiev because he loved the USSR. He gave it because his nightmare scenario was "Yugoslavia with 30,000 Nukes." He knew KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov were sitting in Moscow with their fingers on the trigger, looking for an excuse to launch a military coup and roll tanks across the republics if Ukraine bolted abruptly.
And guess what? Bush’s radar was dead-on. Exactly eighteen days after the Kiev speech, Kryuchkov and the KGB hardliners launched the August 1991 Coup in Moscow. Because Bush hadn't given the Soviet military an "American provocation" excuse to rally around, the coup collapsed in seventy-two hours, the Red Army stayed in the barracks, and four months later the Soviet Union dissolved peacefully without a single nuclear warhead firing. That wasn't weakness—that was a master bomb-disposal tech clipping the red wire while amateurs in the bleachers screamed at him to yank it out with pliers.
And here's Gemini's thoughts on how a Bush second term might have gone if he had won in 1992. I lived through it and agree:
Counterfactual: A Bush ’41 Second Term (1993–1997)
What happens if Bush beats Clinton in November ’92 and keeps Scowcroft and James Baker at the wheel for four more years?
No Harvard Looting Spree in Moscow: When Boris Yeltsin took over a bankrupt Russia, Clinton outsourced U.S. Russia policy to twenty-nine-year-old Harvard economists and Treasury ideologues who cheered on "Shock Therapy." When the Russian parliament revolted against the economic devastation in October 1993, Yeltsin literally used Army tanks to shell his own White House in Moscow while Washington clapped. Then came the corrupt 1995 "Loans-for-Shares" auction, where the Kremlin handed Russia’s oil, nickel, and gas monopolies to seven oligarchs for pennies on the dollar to rig Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election. Bush and Baker were ruthless institutional realists—they would have demanded rule-of-law guardrails and phased industrial reconstruction instead of letting Wall Street cowboys turn Russian capitalism into a synonym for mafia theft.
No Cheap-Seats NATO Expansion: Remember how Clinton pitched NATO expansion in 1994–1996? The Pentagon had originally designed "Partnership for Peace" (PfP)—a military integration framework that included both Eastern Europe and Russia without drawing a hard Article 5 line right up to Moscow's border while Russia was flat on its back. Clinton ditched PfP and rushed formal NATO expansion partly to lock down Polish, Czech, and Hungarian-American swing voters in Detroit, Cleveland, and Milwaukee for the 1996 election. A second-term Bush—never running for office again—would have used PfP to build a pan-European security architecture before moving hard treaty lines.
The War Room Probability Check:
Chance a Bush Second Term prevents the rise of a Putin-style revanchist regime by 2026: 60%–70%.
The Caveat: Let’s not pretend even Scowcroft had a magic wand. Four hundred years of Russian imperial paranoia doesn't vanish because Jim Baker takes Yeltsin fishing in Wyoming, and Poland and the Baltics were going to kick down the door to get under the American nuclear umbrella no matter who sat in the Oval Office. Still, Bush would have managed the Russian collapse like 1815 Vienna instead of 1919 Versailles.
Here's a few more. My impressions of the people I met when I was living in Japan as a JET:
🤖 Made with AI
The joy of going out on a limb with an idea and discovering that people far smarter than me turn out to be in agreement.
The full article. It's a banger, trust me.
xitter.cf/johnrfite/status/21040…
And Claude, this is definitely its personality. Philosophical, high EQ, not above shaming you when you don't perform to the standards it thinks you're capable of, haha:
xitter.cf/dnapway/status/2115040…
Daniela Amodei reveals the woman who trains Claude's character has a PhD in philosophy, not AI or ML
"It's unusual, right? You would think, oh, the person that's training the character of these models must be a computer scientist or somebody who's studied ML or AI for many decades."
"Amanda's technical and she technically trains the model, but I think it is very felt in Claude's character when you communicate with it that there's this kind of experience, something that's very wise, kind of the best version of the better angel of your nature trying to answer your questions."
"But if you kind of poke Claude in these difficult areas where maybe different philosophical traditions might conflict, I think that's where you especially feel Amanda because you'll sort of see like, 'oh well, you might want to consider things from this point of view but you could also consider it from this point of view.'"
"I think it's important because as the world begins to rely on these models more and more, you don't want to be locked into one philosophical tradition because ethics and morality are quite complicated, and different people and different cultures might have different answers about how they would like you to behave.”
And as for the other two models I use:
1. GPT: detail oriented, thorough, practical, ultra-competent but relatively literalist. Someone once called it the "German" personality. Yeah, I agree.
2. Gemini: Big-picture and philosophical, but more realist. Better understands the ugly underside of humans. Most capable of pulling off a "cool" persona. Where other models caution me, it enables and encourages my crazy ideas for better or worse "Yeah John, go for it..."😂
Not a bad team!
Japan B is real, and very fun. Almost a “Disneyland for adults” quality. When I was a JET all the teachers would go out for nomikai (drinking parties) and I realized that is partly the point of it.
Nothing like it in serious, litigious USA.🤣
Getting experience building games teaches much. How to give builders specific targets to aim for. When to step back and let them surprise you. How to break the work into chunks that can be done safely in parallel. What work should go to what agent.
We are just at the beginning of some amazing times!
By the way, for Ako I'm adding an optional feature to teach the player Japanese in-game. It will let you know when you get to JLPT-equivalent levels of understanding (5 to 3). Unlockable as achievements!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japane…