The Cotton Candy Machine

Paul Krugman recently wrote that the never-die MAGA kernel appears to be 19%. That's the number still insisting, despite mounds of evidence, that the economy is terrific.

It's an interesting number, because political scientists have long estimated the MAGA base at 31-33%. These are the full-throated supporters — the rally attendees, etc. Many of them believed that Trump would improve the economy, reveal and prosecute Epstein participants, and avoid forever wars, so they are peeling off at a decent clip...revealing the white-hot inner core of 19% who'll stick faithfully forever.

I played a jazz gig in Galicia, Spain on Francisco Franco's birthday in 1990. The guy (native to Galicia) had been dead 15 years, and it seemed to be the unanimous consensus that Franco's reign had been a nightmare. Evidence was glaring; while Spanish youth were tall, well-fed, and sophisticated, a great many older people looked like pygmies, stunted by malnutrition, and were nearly as provincial as their great-great-great-grandparents.

As we drove to the Friday night gig, we passed crowds of elderly, tiny Spaniards in the streets, dressed in their Sunday best in silent celebration of the long-gone tyrant. This was not some subversive column readying to mount a coup. Many had embraced the subsequent changes with varying reluctance. But they couldn't entirely let go of the cult.

In 2024, 49% voted for Trump, including many of whom didn't like Trump much, and/or were largely apolitical, but preferred to vote for a madman rather than pull a lever for the dreaded Other Side.

Regarding the 19% kernel, John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that 13% of Americans believe in Bigfoot as a real, living creature. This is not much less than the 19% MAGA inner core, and while I'm not claiming it's precisely the same cohort, the scales support my view that Trump is best conceived as the cocky, deluded lunatic at the end of the bar:

Let me share an image I've been returning to since Trump was first elected. It explains his presidency pretty well. Not perfectly, but quite effectively:

You're sitting at a bar. Some stupid gin mill. And Frank, at the end of the bar, is a mouthy know it all shitbrain old dude who dominates conversations, so most people ignore him, which bothers him not one bit. Frank brashly spouts (to whoever will listen, or even to empty space) conspiracy theories, racist poppycock, and bitter criticism of those asshole politicians, knowing with all his heart that he could do a far better job than any of them.

From Frank's perch at the end of the bar, and 6 drinks into his late afternoon tear, that last part seems completely reasonable. Even though he's stupid and feckless and childish and undisciplined and ultimately just two balls and a mouth. Just because he's, y'know, Frank.

Say, through a series of screw-ups and accidents and lucky breaks and Frank's feral refusal to ever quit or acknowledge any limitation of any sort (plus loads of money from his Dad—or at least whatever's leftover that he hasn't squandered—plus a superpower of absolutely zero shamelessness or empathy), Frank gets elected president.

1/3 of the country looks at Frank’s climb, and says “He’s just like me!”, and for them, it’s a glorious shattering of the glass ceiling. They’re in love.

Maybe it was 1/5 of the country, and the rest were just hanging on — and, now, peeling off.

The lunatics sometimes manage to organize (as is their right in a democracy). As momentum is built, they pull others into the gravity well. An additional 14% was pulled in early in the process to forge the MAGA base enjoying the spectacle and tribal inertia (the term "conservative" was being used as a banner — though nothing about this movement was conservative — and, hey, that's a word for me!). Then, like a wand accumulating cotton candy, another 16% glommed on loosely for the presidential election.

That outer 16% peeled back off early, unhappy with masked, badgeless goons committing summary executions, kamikaze trade wars, and a gaseous administration full of unserious buffoons.

The 14% "mantle" are awakening after a very loud party to discover themselves, to their horror, on Team Pedophile hellbent on forever wars.

And the remaining 19% white-hot core will, decades from now, occasionally whip out their nostalgic MAGA hats long after this demon has been thoroughly reviled and repudiated.

The latter are troubling. But a similarly-sized slice believes any bullshit one can imagine. Even without Murdoch, Bannon, et al, they'd have been riled up by some other nonsense. They've always been here. It's not that yahoos were created; it's that they were organized.


And God bless them. Democracy is not about you aways getting your favorite result. That's the other thing.

Abraham Lincoln in Portugal

I was recently asked why I don't hang around with American expats in Portugal. And for once I came up with an apt reply:

"I can't be friends with people who talk about their 'Forever Home'."

This is a standard conceit among Americans in Portugal. Like children in the Pashtun border zones radicalized by jihadi madrases, they've had their brains warped by cursed, infernal YouTube videos — in this case, videos produced by comely middle-aged couples brimming with wellness, inviting everyone to come live your best life in Portugal!.

Something clicks and hordes are transformed into Disney princesses seeking — with dilated pupils — their FORRRRREVER HOMES, and they require constant affirmation. You did it, Thelma! (more on this here).

In my teens I played music to entertain the residents of an insane asylum. And while there were a few I got to know a bit, I discovered that friendship is impossible with a person who thinks he's Abraham Lincoln. Not because I find it deviantly distasteful, but because it's insufficient to merely tolerate their view. To be friends, you need to agree. To buy in.

And I have way too much Bill Murray/Bugs Bunny DNA. On a good day, I can politely suppress my wince, my gurgle, my aggravated sigh. But only as a one-time thing, not as an ongoing service.

Scramjets and Gratitude

Japan's New Hypersonic Engine Could Make 2-Hour Flights To The US A Reality )

A team of engineers from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and several Japanese universities has completed a successful ground combustion trial of a ramjet engine designed for a Mach-5 hypersonic aircraft. The test simulated a flight at five times the speed of sound. It was focused on validating the aircraft's heat-shielding, control surfaces, and engine performance under extreme conditions. The project's goal is commercial hypersonic passenger service by the 2040s.

It won't come online until the 2040's, so I will, alas, miss this. And it's been a life-long preoccupation.

But I lived through rise of the Internet — which everyone, at the time, thought sucked because there was spam, and dial-up was slow — which I still deeply value, though the rest of the world never made their apology as loud as their disrespect.

...and the revolution of digital media — which everyone, at the time, thought sucked because paper and vinyl were beloved and synth tracks circa 1985 were super-cheezy — which I still deeply value, though the rest of the world never really acknowledged the vast perqs.

...and the arrival of artificial intelligence — which I deeply value, though everyone thinks it sucks because idiots use it poorly and post their slop everywhere.

So I do feel a pang for scramjets. But it's ok. I got an awful lot.

Ken Peplowski

Ken Peplowski, widely considered the best jazz clarinetist of his generation, passed away this year, far too young.

I didn't know him as a clarinetist. He was originally a great tenor saxophonist, and gravitated to clarinet later because that's where the gigs were. Musicians don't really make career decisions. They don't have the control or power to choose a course. Their careers are decided for them, however they might deny it.

I knew Ken from Mr. Hick's Place, the tough organ blues joint in Roosevelt, Long Island where Eddie Murphy, who grew up around the corner, had done his first standup (there was an autographed glossy in the manager's office, signed "To Mr. Hick's Place, where I lost my comedy virginity, love, Eddie"), and where I had that unfortunate incident with drum legend Roy Haynes.

Ken was a wonderful jazz and blues sax player, but he started getting more work playing swing, and then more work on clarinet. Soon he locked in there, and hardly anyone knew how much more he could do. When Ken and I occasionally crossed paths in subsequent years and I told him about the bebop, free jazz, klezmer, salsa, and other wide-ranging styles I was playing, he'd seem a little wistful. He could have excelled in any of those scenes. He had similarly free-wheeling DNA, but success can lock you firmly into a narrow space. Me, I had the great good fortune to be starving to death, and playing anything I wanted.

Another player our age back in the day at Mr. Hick's Place was modern jazz saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, also wailing the blues at the time. We never shared a stage; Ellery and Ken played weekly like me, but we each had our own night. Ellery was also versatile, and might have wound up a swing guy like Ken, or a miscellany guy like me, but we all took such extremely different tacks that today it's almost impossible to believe we all converged so early on doing that.

Come to think of it, it's probably weirder still that I became a food critic and Internet entrepreneur. We didn't diverge, we careened.

Fast forward a decade from the Mr. Hicks years, and I'm playing with the Lionel Hampton big band. One night the great Benny Golson is substituting for Hamp. Golson is a sophisticate, a glass of fine cognac, very harmonically advanced but he played with a velvety ease that made it easy to forget how modern he actually was. The band, which had been Clockwork Oranged by Hamp and his manager to play with an intensity that could best be described as desperate/frantic, goaded Golson into uncharacteristic bluesiness that turned rambunctious and, finally, screamingly rambunctious. I almost couldn't believe my eyes and ears. Imagine Tony Bennett yelping like Sid Vicious. Of course, Benny sounded great.

While I was waiting on the bus to be driven back to town, Benny boarded and settled into the seat across from mine. “Will a recording of this evening’s performance be issued in Japan as 'Benny Golson, Hootin’ and Hollerin’?” I asked with a grin.

Benny cackled smoothly, his cool very much regained. After staring dreamily into the distance for a moment, he focused his eyes and turned his head back toward mine.

"You know, we all got our start doing that. Playing that music. Walking the bar. Any musician from my time who claims he didn't is a liar."

"Same," I replied, amiably.

How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government

A reader unwilling to click the "further reading" link below my previous posting, "The Posing Tourist, Revealed", graciously and politely requested that I flesh out my point more fully. Here you go.


What I’m criticizing here is not people adhering to tradition, convention, discipline, or even rote repetition. A great baker may bake familiar bread. A great singer may sing within a familiar form. A great speaker may use ancient rhetorical tools. None of that is the problem I'm describing.

The problem is framing.

We've all been to bakeries offering perfectly competent pastries assembled from all the standard shortcuts. Their goal is to seem like a bakery; signal as a bakery; do bakery things. Not one bite delights, because it's 100% presentational. "Look at my bakery! I'm the guy running a bakery!" not "Taste my scone into which I've poured my heart and soul."

There are fewer devastating heartfelt scones today than previously, and more role-filling bakeries, not because people are greedy, expedient, or talentless, but because they're scarcely thinking of baking. They just want to run bakeries.

The issue is framing.

Music can affect and inspire when musicians show up to PLAY, rather than act like musicians doing musician things. Sing a legitimately soulful note without trying to hammily seem like The Soulful Singer.

This is not a plea for originality. Artists who frantically reject discipline and tradition to come off as innovators are the worst tourists of all. “Look! Now it’s me breaking the rules!” is still posing in a plywood cutout. Originality is just another image.

Sing, play, paint, or write something because you actually have something to say, and do so with heartfelt talent and care, and it will seem original — or, at least, personal — in a deep way even if you're working firmly within tradition.

This is also not an objection to inhabiting social roles in everyday life. Human beings naturally adopt recognizable styles and identities. That’s fine. The problem begins when this mentality invades matters of substance: leadership, thought, communication, art. The role-playing has leaked into those areas until there's blessed little reality left. We have leaders who speak entirely in the prefab language of leadership; weak, unserious men snarling about strength and seriousness.

People doing substantial or creative work should aspire to more than merely occupying an image of a person who does the thing. But people lacking any such aspiration have flooded into the spotlight purely to seem like thing-doers. The result is a world drowning in their canned fodder.

Yet reality still leaks through. Sometimes the bakery is awesome. Sometimes the singer truly moves you. Sometimes someone says something in a way that cuts through all the prefab cadence and reaches you directly. If this became a broader norm (even just an enduring 5% slice of the pie), we'd live in a fabulous world.

People do know the difference. Yet society is headed the other way.


My previous posting explained how this happens. How it goes off the rails. I don't see anyone else out there who's spotted what's happening, and why. And it's slippery to try to explain because 1. it's subtle, and 2. a world of poseurs is ill-equipped to discuss reality (it's like explaining the atmosphere to a fish).

The Posing Tourist, Revealed

Virtually every so-called creative artist in the world at this juncture does the equivalent of thrusting their eager grinning face into a cut-out hole in a plywood tourist tableau and saying "Look! It's me! I'm doing the thing!"

Whenever you hear the nth singer sing that bluesy note singers always sing to signal bluesiness, it's precisely that same impulse. "Look! Now it's me doing it! I'm the soulful bluesy singer!"

It's most flagrant with political speeches. Every politician gives the same speech. The words scarcely matter, because the politician has nothing particularly important to say. He's there just to be That Guy with the haircut at the podium giving The Speech. "Now it's me! I'm giving the speech!" At rare moments where the words actually matter, they can't rise to the occasion because shallow preening is all they've got. The posing tourist, revealed.

I've often noted that most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

But this is not really about singers.

Also, I'm getting ready to nix "most".

Further reading: "The Crux of Creativity"


Followup posting: "How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government"

Yogis

I've never met a yogi.

I've met many people performing yoga theater, but not one yogi.

How do I define it? With unusual tolerance. Just two simple asks:

1. You invest 99% or less of your energy into ego gratification (with — and this is critical — a downward trend), and

2. You spend 99% or less of your time posing (with a downward trend).

Instead, they grow egomaniacal about their glorious egolessness (awareness of pride ---> pride of awareness), and they strike a flamboyant pose of non-pretension. In other words: yoga theater.

When someone informs you they are "spiritual", it's helpful to hear the opposite. All you know for certain is that a pellet of gluten might fucking kill them. And if they've metastasized to the point where they display perma-smiles, soften their voices to a velvety hush, and thrust forward the deep, vast, profound pools that are their eyes in the same way a stripper would proffer her tits, best to steer clear. Spirituality claims to renounce image-signaling, while such people run the opposite way, full-speed. Which is scary.

Last week I visited a vegetarian cafe run by a stern, authoritarian, gaunt older woman with white-lady dreadlocks. A sign was hung front and center for all those entering: "This is a sacred space."

I tried not to grin, or to smirk, or to laugh uproariously, but failed miserably in a cascade. After surveying the plates of food, which looked unloving and harsh, I quickly beat it out of the space of her sacredness.

Imagine announcing to the world that you've created a Sacred Space. What are you saying about yourself?


The great teacher Nisargadatta, author of the classic "I am That," stressed, above all, sincerity. Funny how none of his many followers ever seem to talk about that part.

The Plain-Sight Secret About Investing

I'm replaying this posting from April, 2021


99% of investors have no idea what the bet is that they're making. It's shocking.

"Elon Musk seems super smart, and he's had so much success in the past, and his future plans sound exciting. Tesla seems like an awfully good bet!"

No. Don't do that. The purchase of Tesla stock is not a bet on the company, like betting on a horse in a race. It's one level more sophisticated and abstract: you are betting on the underestimation of Tesla by other investors. That's the bet; the only bet. You're never betting on a company, you're betting against other investors' sentiment about that company. And those people are all aware of Musk's history, too. That's not privileged information.

Have you ever noticed that many people imagine that when they say the same old shit we've all heard a zillion times it has a special ring? "Now it's me saying it!" In everyday life, this daffy mental miscalculation is annoying. In the stock market, it pays for the 1%'s Lear jets.

This is, oddly, terrifically difficult for nearly everyone to grok. Small time "retail" investors misunderstand because they're naive (naïveté is the single greatest impediment to clarity). Day traders, who grok this in theory, lose touch with it amid the bustle of their manic and complicated trading (complexity is the second greatest impediment to clarity). And professional financiers, who understand this better than any of us, are distracted by their smug self-confidence (ego is the third greatest impediment to clarity).

Most of all, it's a framing problem. If you're an addicted gambler (as most investors are, at all three levels), you do not possess a lithe perspective (see this for how addiction is a framing problem). You are rigid and stuck. You are compelled to see things like a horse track, and can't find the calm latitude to reframe to a more sophisticated, subtle, abstract perspective. Your attention remains riveted to "GO TEAM,” in all-caps. 

We all have an opinion as to whether Amazon still has room to grow, or if Tesla can maintain profits with big automakers getting into electric. Opinions are like assholes; we all have one. And yours may even be correct. But that's not enough. Because your bet is not on Amazon or Tesla, but against titans infinitely smarter and better informed than you. They effectively set the price, and that price already reflects their (smart) consensus opinion. And there's not a single thought in your head that's ahead of them. So you will not only not win against them; they will, over time, eat your lunch.

So don't read annual reports. Don't try to be a smarty. All info is already baked in to the price by people way smarter than you (if you assume no one's smarter than you, then I have good news: your impending poverty will divest you of that delusion). Again: You're not betting on a company, you're betting against the market's estimation of that company. It's not a proposition of predicting business success.

So why would anyone bet against billionaire geniuses and their office towers stocked full of MIT educated analysts? Wouldn't that be crazy?

Yes. Yes it would. Which is why people should invest in index mutual funds, which rise (and, alas, sink) with the market, often bringing even better success than the outcomes for individual twitchy billionaire geniuses (because the latter are limited by ego and an addict’s perspective).

The only exception is if you have some sort of an edge. Which 99.9999% of the time you won't.

Patience is a potent edge. The billionaire geniuses need to be constantly hitting home runs. They can't patiently wait stuff out. They're twitchy. That's why my strategy of buying Apple in its downturns has worked. I can park my money for a year, and those guys can't. Neither can day traders, who are equally twitchy. So, often, it's only sad little me buying on downturns and selling on peaks, while everyone else spazzes out, flocks irrationally, and goes foolishly the wrong way. They’re pursuing bazooka home runs this quarter while I’m content with 25% gains next year. I gobble up discarded crumbs.

Specialized knowledge can also be an edge. A friend runs a genetics lab, and told me TXG's technology would one day be ubiquitous. He could hardly wait to have it, himself. I bought at $54, and it's now $188. Of course, it might just as easily have crashed. Maybe the CEO is a dork. An edge is not a superpower, it's just a way to marginally de-shmuck oneself. Billionaire geniuses also know people running genetics labs. Mostly, I got lucky. But a little luckier than if I'd flown blind, trusting my own puny acumen.

Years ago, I wrote breathlessly about SIGA, a company with an entirely effective (and no side-effects) smallpox cure. It’s a bio-terror countermeasure (it works on weaponized versions), and it also works on cowpox and monkey pox, which are both still out there. I'm still hanging on to half my shares, and at $7 I've made out decently with my $2 investment, though it's sat listlessly for so many years that it's no jackpot. This year I expect at least one big foreign government sale, and/or a sale to US gov with a different formulation, which should hopefully pop the stock back to $12-15. At that point, I'll sell (there's time pressure: their patent on the drug actually runs out in a few years - insert bug-eyed/astonished emoji - and soon I'll be so old that I'd only enjoy a jackpot by gold-plating my walker), and it will amount to good profit despite the ridiculous time lag. In this case, my patience was my edge, then my stubbornness was my edge, then my religious faith was my edge, and, at this point, my stupidity is my edge. All these things are unavailable to billionaire geniuses. I stay in my lane.

It’s hard to understand this maxim, and harder still to live by it. And it’s almost impossible to find an edge for yourself, and harder still to maximize that edge without being clouded by ego or by addictive glee over successes. 

I seem to be at that latter stage. I’ve been beating the market (I bought in low to CRIS, PRKR, BCRX, and the aforementioned TXG and SIGA, in addition to cultivating Apple’s periodic lulls). But it’s more than likely a blip, like flipping “heads” a few times more than likely. So I’m keeping my outlay prudently low. 

Infinite Wealth, Baby

I'm spending very little here in the land of 12€ lunches, 30€ doctor visits, 200€/month health insurance payments, 50€/month condo fees, 4€ 15 minute Uber rides, 35€ grocery bills and 1€ wine carafes. And my health, while stable, isn't such that I foresee 20-30 years of hearty functionality. So, per this posting about the non-linearity of spending with age, I've been trying to enjoy a little more and relax my spending limits. All the saving and sacrifice I've done (more than most people, I believe) ought to lead to something while I'm still able to enjoy it. Now's the time.

The result has been surprising. I had to be in Lisbon for a 7am appointment, so I booked a hotel. And I chose a really nice one (paradoxially, in one of my most impoverished eras I was put up by promotors at five star European lodgings while on jazz festival tours, developing a taste for nice hotels). It was...nice. Oh, and my favorite film director just released a blu-ray in USA only, so I paid Amazon an extra $30 to send it across the Atlantic. And....that's about it.

Sometimes when my socks feel unfresh I switch mid-day, knowing it will increase wear and tear (having been quite poor for a long time, that will never not set off mental alarms). "Spendin' money!" I boast cheerily to the empty room, a big shot flinging slighty wilted footwear into the hamper.

So, figuring a dollar's depreciation on the socks plus blu-ray and hotel, I've lavished a splendid 331€ on myself this year above/beyond basics.

I decided to try harder. "I am infinitely wealthy," I announced to the audience previously awed by my sock performance. But nothing's happened. Though I feel no deprivation aside from the ironic let-down of finally removing dampers only to discover that the engine needn't race.

Me & You

If you evade the commands of a control freak, they'll see you as trying to control them.

Similarly, egomaniacs view assertion as challenge.

I used to wonder why a book explaining "I'm OK – You're OK" needed to be written, much less sell 15 million copies to readers stunned by the gleaming insight.

But I've also wondered why the Golden Rule is widely seen as loftily unattainable.