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.

Rebel Conformity

Political extremists often criticize moderates for being dull and boring. My experience is the opposite.

Every progressive and every MAGA sings pretty much the same song. But while moderates sing less flamboyantly, they often have unique views they express in freshly personal ways.


Millions feel genuinely maverick for their interest in "indie-rock" or "independent cinema". I don't even understand how those terms can be used unironically at this point, but the culture has pivoted to accept flocks of dull slobs grasping at formulaic banality to feign nonconformity.

My Own Internal Portugal

Portugal is a country of charming, acceptable sloppiness where there is no patience whatsoever for YOUR sloppiness because everyone's entirely fed up with the pervasive sloppiness (including, of course, their own). Any gaffe you make will break the camel's back.

And I'm experiencing my own internal Portugal as old age increases my likelihood of creating problems for myself in direct proportion to my impatience with self-created problems.

Instagramism

I'm finally reaching a point of clarity after 40 years of avid chowhounding — tens of thousands of restaurant meals in two dozen countries plus three years coming to grips with having gotten "what I'd wished for." Having landed on point in the epicenter of sublime grandma cooking, I've been increasingly desperate for cooking with precision and refinement.

I devour amply soulful €11 lunches daily, cooked by octogenarian Portuguese grandmas in the country's one happy town, enduring unpeeled fava beans (extract with your teeth, like artichoke leaves), un-cored baked apples (cut around it), well-done meats, and a staunchly limited repertoire referred to, in hushed religious tones, as "comida tradicional Portuguesa".

In my desperate seeking for precision and refinement, my impulse is to up-pay. Will someone who's actually trained as a chef please charge me egregiously so I can get a break from this unremitting flood of precisely what I've always wanted?

I haven't found this in Portugal. The swanky places in Lisbon feel...off. They're like photocopies of imitations of real restaurants. Thinly unconvincing attempts to wow via presentation, while the cooking has no extra nuance or touch at all. They'll gladly scoop wads of cash from your wallet, but the value-added is drizzly sauces, track lighting, and snazzy tall stacking. In a word: Instagramism.

I figured this was because Portugal is so steeped in grandma cooking that anyone aspiring to charge over 11€/cover skips other options and goes straight to Instagramism. Deliciousness means grandma, while fancy means photography.

But I'm finding this even outside of Portugal (but without the strong "grandma" stratum). And, come to think of it, this scenario was arising in America before I left. The world shot by me, and I'm only just noticing.

The age-old problem in food service has always been justifying premium. We all know that ingredients are cheap and fire is free, so the entire history of dining can be told as an increasingly elaborate effort to coax the johns into paying extra. So, really, Instagramism was present all along. Starchy linen tablecloths, well-attired fawning staff, careful plating on fine china and swanky jazz soundtracks "set a higher tone" long before the Internet arose. Such psy-ops were contrived in late 19th century France, and photogenic allure is just the latest gambit for spellbinding diners into up-paying.

But the food in linen tablecloth places used to be at least sometimes — nowhere near 50% of the time — skillfully cooked, because at least a few customers — beyond preoccupation with status, trendiness and sensation — were also tasting with discernment. Now, much less so. Diners want to "bag" their photographic scores and display them like trophy mounts. While they still use the language of ingestion, it's flattened into "yum," the mindlessly visceral assessment one might translate from an eager hog deep into his feed.

Grease, check. Salt, check. Great photo. Yum!

So it's not that I'm caught in a uniquely Portuguese dining trap. It's that I'm experiencing gastronomic phantom limb pain. Because the choices now are 1. sloppy soulful (or less soulful slop), or 2. food that looks totally YUM. Ambitious operators are, naturally, drawn to the current luxury signifier: making food shiny and photogenic.

Jesus' Phone Number

I was suggesting local restaurants to a Portuguese friend. Suddenly, he had an idea to bounce off of me.

"Isn't it a shame there's no app that gives you surefire food tips wherever you go?"

I winced painfully and told him that I'd created that once. I gathered an unusually expert group of food lovers to swap tips and answer questions, and it eventually scaled so large that a staggering number of obscure nooks and crannies were explored and accounted for. He asked me for a download link, and I told him this was all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

It would never work for Portugal, I explained, because here people mostly eat at the same lunch hole for decades, and the same special occasion place their parents and grandparents frequented. Lunch is at the place closest to home or work, and no one here would ever try the place two corners down. I work very much against the tide by exploring the full landscape of options. Since hardly anyone chowhounds (understandable, given that no country more richly rewards dining complacency), there are no savvy opinions to create an app around.

I didn't expect him to register that he'd received a reply from perhaps the most qualified person to answer that particular question. But I figured my response was reasonably interesting and persuasive. And here's how he responded:

After listening politely, he waited a beat and continued. "But, yeah, no, wouldn't it be great if there was an *app*—you know, like a smart phone app!—which would tell you the good places to eat?"

Is this mic on? Can anyone hear me? Did I not just say words? I could swear I just said words!

This, alas, seems to be the new normal. Not just with food, I mean with any topic. Way back in elementary school, I recognized that communication was a suspension-of-disbelief proposition. But over the years, it's either decayed still further, or else I'm noticing more clearly what was always true.

In either case, I've reached an extreme Twilight Zone scenario where it feels as if the humans were swapped out with insensate wraiths so lost in inner fog that they can't parse a word. No one seems able to process new information. Like early computers, we process only stock statements phrased within rigid semantic constraints—and then output pre-fab answers. It's like punch cards (and it's hilarious that we find chatbots—which can actually take a point and reply on-track—fakely superficial).

If I were to offer a devout Christian Jesus' personal cellphone number, he'd stare blankly as I spoke the numbers, not bothering to write them down. Then he'd graciously thank me for the information with the words he customarily uses for gracious thanks, going on to say some of the canned things he always says...like a video game character ("Evening, friend! What's your pleasure?" pipes up the burly bartender as you scour his medieval tavern for hidden treasure maps).

I haven't had a conversation that could pass a Turing Test in a very long time. To be sure, I've exchanged stock statements within rigid semantic constraints and been offered pre-fab replies, whereupon I feigned pleasurable engagement. More often, people drift entirely past my point as I offer them exactly what they'd professed to be interested in. Even if they'd hit a sweet spot where I could offer an authoritative reply. Or Jesus' phone number.

Happily, there's a lot of delicious food out there. And terrific movies and TV. Plus all the free sunlight and oxygen we could possibly want. We are so free and safe and healthy and comfortable and entertained as to be the envy of our ancestors, who sigh from their graves at our good fortune. But even in their repose, they're better conversationalists than we are.

Redistricting, Disinformation, and the Aesthetics of Cynicism

Like most anti-MAGAs (i.e. those to the left of, say, Mussolini), it’s been deeply engrained in me that Republican gerrymandering in Texas defied a norm, and Democrats are simply aping that move, exploiting the same norm, only much more successfully (in Virginia and Florida, etc.), and that Republicans are shedding crocodile tears over it.

But just because the other side lies incessantly doesn’t mean “my side” is honest, honorable and sane. It doesn’t, alas, work that way.

In fact, my engrained understanding of the redistricting fight, though emotionally satisfying, might have been spinny bullshit. Argh.

So I had a talk with chatGPT...

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The Dems insist that their redistricting moves in FL and VA were merely tit for tat after Republican redistricting schemes in TX a few months ago. Republicans are accusing Dems of leaving the voters out, but Dems say that’s exactly what the Republicans did in TX.

But I just saw a tweet saying “state legislature elections have different norms for citizen involvement”.

Can you flesh that out, and tell me if Democrats are making a false equivalence? I’m anti-MAGA, but also anti-bullshit.

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Short answer: both sides are telling selectively true stories. The “different norms” point is real—but it explains the disagreement more than it resolves it.

There are three broad redistricting setups in the U.S.:

1. Legislature-controlled (e.g. Texas, Florida)
Maps are passed like ordinary laws. No required public vote.
👉 Mid-decade redraws without voters are procedurally normal here—even if aggressive.
2. Commission-based (e.g. California)
Independent/bipartisan bodies draw maps.
👉 Bypassing them violates the system’s intent.
3. Hybrid / voter-constrained (e.g. Virginia)
Legislatures operate under voter-approved rules, and structural changes can involve referenda.
👉 Voter involvement is part of the design.

So:

* Texas: legislature redraws mid-decade → normal process, partisan outcome

* Virginia: voters approve a change enabling a redraw → more participatory process, same partisan aim

Different procedures, same underlying move. Are Democrats making a false equivalence? Not exactly—but it’s slippery.

They’re right that Republicans normalized mid-decade gerrymandering. But they stretch it by implying: “this is exactly the same thing.” It isn’t—procedurally. It is—strategically.

Republicans, meanwhile, complain about “cutting voters out” even where voters were explicitly involved, leaning instead on a broader fairness argument.

The cleanest read: same game, different rulebooks, identical incentives.

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I’m exhausted by all sides spraying untruths 24/7. “Everyone is lying to me incessantly” leads to Soviet-style cynicism—i.e. there is no truth. It’s a big reason I moved to Portugal.

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That slide is real—but it’s also a trap.

There’s a difference between “everyone is lying” and “everyone is spinning from a position of interest.” The redistricting fight is closer to the second. It feels like the first because both sides are telling true things that are strategically incomplete. A few things remain solid:

• Mid-decade redistricting is now normalized

• Both parties use it for advantage
• States operate under genuinely different rules

The confusion comes from collapsing two axes into one:

* outcome (“it’s the same”)
* process (“it’s different”)

Both are true. Neither is sufficient alone.

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Hey, one does what one can. But my unfamiliarity with Portugal keeps me planted in the immediate and not drifting out into the fluffy storyline strata of it all. Unfamiliarity plants you in the here-and-now.

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That’s a useful constraint.

Operating in a second language narrows interpretation. You track what’s actually said, not the expanding cloud of implication.

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Portuguese culture generally parses as adorable, largely because it’s unfamiliar.

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What reads as “bullshit” at home lands more like “local shimmy” abroad—not because it’s purer, but because it hasn’t yet collapsed into a familiar pattern.

The downside: drift, missed expectations, the 11:00 that becomes 11:40.

The upside: less narrative inflation.

---

It occurs to me that I might have missed a critical axis in this equation: tedium.

Maybe I’m not sick of being lied to incessantly, but am mostly tired of being lied to in the same irritating way.

That tracks with cynical Russians I’ve met. They’re more bored than angry. I used to figure they were numb from long suffering. But perhaps it’s more about length and less about suffering. They’re fed up with the form more than the content.

---

That’s the sharper cut.

After repetition, the brain compresses: “I’ve seen this move.” Novelty disappears. Attention withdraws. What remains isn’t outrage—it’s boredom. Not “This is intolerable” but “This again.”

If tedium is the driver, then the opposite of cynicism isn’t truth—it’s novelty: encountering something that doesn’t instantly collapse into a known pattern.

So instead of: “Everyone is lying so there is no truth,” you get: “Everyone is running the same scripts so I’m exhausted by the repetition.” Less existential. More like creative bankruptcy.

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Yeah. Nice aikido flip. And I think it’s apt, and not mere “copium” (i.e. just “a nice way to think of it”).

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It helps—but it doesn’t absolve anything. A stale lie is still a lie.

What changes is the affect. Outrage energizes, while boredom anesthetizes

Systems don’t need to persuade you. They just need to out-repeat your capacity to care.

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I guess it boils down to “Lie differently, please!” It’s an awfully odd stataement, but it wouldn’t provoke a knowing chuckle if there weren’t something to it.

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Exactly. It’s not about truth—it’s about repetition.

“I know you won’t stop—just don’t run the same script.”

That’s acknowledged artifice. The joke lands because the pattern is seen.

There’s a catch: better lies can re-engage you without improving anything. You’re asking for better performance, not better truth.

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It’s a huge shift to pin the problem on aesthetic considerations. Tonal considerations. Dramaturgic considerations!

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Yes—that’s the turn. You stop asking only “Is this true?” and start asking “How is this being performed?”

Now you have three axes:

• Truth
• Power/Intent
• Aesthetic (alive vs dead performance)

Tedium is what aesthetic failure feels like from the inside.

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Cynicism could be parsed as interest shifting away from some strata due, largely, to tedium. Even though it’s always attributed as a rejection of substance (“those bastards!”), due to projection. I.e. “The preoccupation that previously drew my passion has failed to hold my enthusiastic attention. My fallen interest must be their fault.”

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That tracks. Cynicism often isn’t heightened clarity—it’s attentional withdrawal. “I’ve seen this scene too many times.”

That withdrawal gets recast as moral judgment, ala “they’re contemptible,” which preserves a sense of certainty. But the underlying shift is simpler:

curiosity → recognition → saturation → disengagement

Seeing that distinction prevents the jump to: “there is no truth”

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If you have no fresh new stratum to shift to and absorb in to replace the one that dried up for you, you’ll wind up listless and defeated. But that’s not the inevitable outcome of cynicism, even though that’s how we imagine cynics. You can always reframe into some new enthusiasm or perspective or movement or general area of concern.

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Right. Cynicism isn’t terminal. It’s local exhaustion. If you can shift frames, you don’t get stuck there.

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Well, we’ve at least squeezed some epistemological takeaway from the current redistricting furor!

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Not a bad yield. A messy political spat becomes a usable lens.

Impermeable Conviction

Even after a solid decade spent with our faces firmly planted in the thoroughly miserable psychological taint of a prodigiously wealthy and powerful man, our assumption that wealth and power constitute "winning" (and their lack compels and justifies aggrieved discontent) will remain fully intact.

Not a single nanometer of firm conviction will have been shaved off by this bitter experience.

Feral Cunning

Two things severely suppress intelligence: arrogance and ambition.

Intelligence flows freely through dilation, while arrogance and ego are constrictive. They pinch the pipes.

Self-pinching produces a certain sharpening: feral cunning. But while feral cunning is a mental phenomenon, I don't equate it with intelligence.

Humans, having comparatively recently come in from the fields and stopped crushing boulders, remain blurry about distinctions between different mental functions. Non-physical activity seems like a single blob, so "intelligence" sloppily covers everything not involving brute strength or steady hands. Feral cunning is done with the mind, so it's lumped under "intelligence".

This reconciles Donald Trump's stupidity with his shrewd flair for survival and dominance. As pinched as any human alive, he possesses extremes of both stupidity and feral cunning.

Going the other way, reducing constriction boosts intelligence.


One can smell constriction. Especially at extremes, it stinks. Literally rank stupidity. Dilation, by contrast, smells like perfume. This is what yogis and shaman mean by "purification".

Frank, the Cocky Loudmouth at the End of the Bar

A friend was bewildered as to why Trump appointed a clown like Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. My reply:


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. Who does Frank appoint defense secretary?

Does he put in the work, flipping through binders of disciplined, stony civil servants and defense experts to determine someone qualified and competent?

Frank? Are you kidding?

No. "Who," thinks Frank, "is that pugnacious guy on FOX who's nearly as loud and cocksure as I am, who goes on and on about how we need to be TOUGH and stop being PUSSIES and HURT THE ENEMY and not be distracted with being NICE to people (gays, minorities, women) when we need real manly men who will SLAUGHTER REMORSELESSLY?"

Frank gets the name, and circles it with his Sharpie. "He seems perfect to me! That's my guy!"

Because of course he does. What else would you expect from Frank? Frank doesn't know anything. He's just that shitbrain from the bar. So of course he appoints the poser hair gel tough guy from the TV. How would this baffle you? What do you expect from Frank? Hey, you voted for Frank, suspecting that he was a paper-thin mouthy shitbrain running entirely on balls-in-your-face cocksure brio. And you're surprised he'd make this move?

For a sightly more satirical version, see Peter Seller's "Being There", a great film about a simple-minded gardener who keeps rising and rising.

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And 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.

Meanwhile, the Left hates Frank, but they're at least as devoted to this sort of political ego projection. According to their doctrine, every identity group pines for, and ultimately deserves, a politician who “looks like me.”

Me, sure, I’d vote for a Jewish president. But if a Presbyterian were an even slightly better candidate, I wouldn’t even need to blink at the decision. I can’t generate a nano-calorie of extra enthusiasm for a president who belongs to some group I belong to. How about someone smart? And competent? And hopefully, god willing, boring? Maybe that’s the way to choose a leader, rather than get one’s ego and victimhood (every American is an aggrieved victim) and self-story-telling all wrapped up in it. That’s how Franks get through!

We need to stop making politics a narcissistic mirror. That’s what frickin’ Instagram is for.

Don’t blame Frank. He’s just a disturbed opportunist. Blame us!

Working Around a Missing Feature in Apple Notes

Annoyingly, you cannot make a Note in MacOS read-only (i.e. unalterable). So if you have a note containing important information which you frequently open in mobile, a stray hand movement might alter its content and you might not notice in time to perform an "undo", leaving you "screwed" as they say in the tech world.

The standard workaround (until Apple finally solves this) is clunky:

Create a new Notes folder

Share the Folder with yourself

Set permissions to View Only

Move the note into that folder

That's a lot of work. And I can't anticipate all the consequences, some of which will inevitably be painful in some unforseeable way.

I'm a fan of lazy, dumb, good-enough solutions one might miss while trying to find a non-existent perfect solution. So here's my move:

Control/Left-click the note in the sidebar of the Notes app.

Choose "Duplicate"

Rename the newly created note so it sorts, alphabeticallly, just beneath the original version, but append the name with "(xxxxBACKUP VERSIONxxxx)".

And never ever open that one.

Dumb. Inelegant. Lazy. Sloppy. Welcome to my world!