If you were cursed by some gnarled shaman (maybe you unknowingly stole his parking space) with creativity and counterintuitive insight, here’s what you can expect:
People will constantly explain to you, in stern, often condescending tones, elementary principles - the conventional thoughts you appear to have dementedly missed. You know, basic human stuff.
You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve had banal second grade precepts patiently explained to me. I suppose I should appreciate the effort. One, after all, is never so tall as when one stoops to help a child. And I am blessed with giants.
They try to helpfully revert me to the mean. To re-bread the cutlet. To get me straightened out and flying right, in proper conformity with “normal” people.
Occasionally, shrewdness is detected on my end, which briefly forestalls the tutoring. Maybe there’s actually something in there! But this buys me no credit whatsoever. No slack. I‘ve simply struck confirmation bias on a topic of interest. The clock is ticking, and, when I subsequently conflict with some less examined assumption, my spotty inconsistency is revealed. They’ll take out the crayons and construction paper and set about acquainting me with first principles re: life on Earth.
I’m actually describing the best-case scenario. For most people, I’m a babbler of nonsense. Mr. Random. Leave him be!
I don’t note any of this with a knowing mirthful wink. I always figured this sort of thing was noted with a knowing mirthful wink. No, it's noted with the facial tics and odd cringes common among the maladjusted - an affect that certainly doesn’t help with the aforementioned credit deficit.
Of course, I do not talk to people in real life anything like how I write in this Slog. I wouldn’t dare broach these subjects. No, I constrain myself to accessible, common interests. In fact, that’s how the whole food thing developed. “Everyone eats,” I figured early on.
But my creativity and expansive perspective inevitably insinuate themselves, skewing my take, my expression, my sense of humor, my affect. I don’t speak the normal, scripted lines, and I don’t emulate a soothingly familiar clone line personality - That Guy you’ve met a thousand times.
I saw the problem early on, and imagined I could squeak through, finding slack as “a real character”. But that route has dried up over the decades. This film no longer casts character actors. It’s all dramatic leads. No one’s here to enrich the story. There is no story; just protagonists striving anxiously for more flattering light.
Friday, December 29, 2023
Sunday, December 24, 2023
We Are Enjoying Peak Humanity Right Now
So, last time, I left you, on Christmas Eve, hanging on the proposition of the impending decline of Western Civilization. Merry nothin'!
What's the positive take on such a gloomy message? Let me state the obvious - so flagrantly obvious that almost no one can see it. So obvious that I forget I need to keep restating it. Here goes:
We are currently - right now; right this second! - riding the crest of the best experience humanity has ever had, and likely ever will have. We perch, impossibly, on the tippy top of the curve of declining results. We enjoy plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and personal motorized coaches, and antibiotics, and all is comparatively safe and quiet. You live the magical life of fairy tale royalty compared to your great grandparents, who, themselves, were vastly privileged compared to their forebears.
What's more, we are not yet experiencing the severe repercussions of our aristocratic perch. It feels tempestuous out there, sure, but come back to your senses, in here. Are you safe? Are you eating? Reasonably healthy? Any chunks fallen off lately? Is your life a crisis so dire that you continually run to the bathroom to vomit from hot hopeless desperation? Is anyone hunting you down to kill you and your loved ones? Do your kids risk death from infected paper cuts and scrapes? Is your feudal landlord demanding his monthly night of pleasure with your wife? No? Just "another day in paradise," you report, wryly, from ACTUAL PARADISE, which you deem a mixed bag at best because it doesn't present every facet of perfect perfection you’ve ever contemplated?
Right at this moment, we have all the power and freedom and comfort and security and peace and entertainment and self-determination and options, with none of the yawing maladies actually ruining anything. If we had a time machine and could choose anytime to live, we could not have done better. We took the cherry off the sundae. We grabbed the gold ring. We KILLED IT.
No one has punched me in years. I walk around with a plastic thingee in my heart keeping me impossibly alive and a device in my pocket offering all knowledge, entertainment, and communication, on demand. Drivers will literally pull over to allow a special medical truck to rush me to hospital as the top civic priority, like I was Julius Freaking Caesar. Actuality is tremendous, which explains why we're compulsively drawn to dramatically dire thinking, simply to ballast the extreme excess of perfectly appropriate happiness!
So just suck up the awesomeness…if you can do so amid 300 million people insisting everything sucks! They are entitled, blinkered, over-privileged aristocrats all, especially the ones most stridently claiming victimhood. But don't let them harsh your buzz. Rather, soothe them like the adorable, innocent babies they are...or at least engage your intention to do so. Simply frame them thus. You'll feel better, and they'll feel better-seen. They're just a bit burpy, that’s all.
"But wait;" you might ask, "aren't you really saying it's all downhill from here?"
That's awfully dramatic. Potential loss of snidely unappreciated privilege has always been the aristocrat’s anxiety. I hate hate hate my position, but will squeal like a cut pig if they try to take it away.
Look, if you can’t muster gratitude for the Right Now of it all, bucking enormous odds to live during this brief window of Peak Humanity, and can only focus on its (forecasted potential) loss - richly ironic despair given that, just five minutes ago, you imagined you were already languishing in Hell - then you don’t deserve Peak Humanity.
What's more, you'd have ditzily and needlessly pushed the eject button, framing yourself out of Heaven (What IS) and into Hell (a not-here/not-now mental story you've made yourself believe), just as I foolishly did one Christmas Eve many years ago. An entitled demand for Perfect Forever Perfection makes you the aristocrat; the leading edge; the very cause of the downfall, both internally and externally. So why not opt out of such foolishness? C'mon, it's Christmas!!!
I've described Actuality. I realize your peer groups sharply disagree, and you yourself feel vexed by a plethora of petty mattress peas while striving for seamlessly serene repose. But we all are the very luckiest of our entire funnel of ancestors, back to the first proto-mammal venturing out of the ocean barely imagining lasagna or fleece-lined sweatpants!
And with that, I wish you, very heartfully, a very Merry Christmas!
What's the positive take on such a gloomy message? Let me state the obvious - so flagrantly obvious that almost no one can see it. So obvious that I forget I need to keep restating it. Here goes:
We are currently - right now; right this second! - riding the crest of the best experience humanity has ever had, and likely ever will have. We perch, impossibly, on the tippy top of the curve of declining results. We enjoy plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and personal motorized coaches, and antibiotics, and all is comparatively safe and quiet. You live the magical life of fairy tale royalty compared to your great grandparents, who, themselves, were vastly privileged compared to their forebears.
What's more, we are not yet experiencing the severe repercussions of our aristocratic perch. It feels tempestuous out there, sure, but come back to your senses, in here. Are you safe? Are you eating? Reasonably healthy? Any chunks fallen off lately? Is your life a crisis so dire that you continually run to the bathroom to vomit from hot hopeless desperation? Is anyone hunting you down to kill you and your loved ones? Do your kids risk death from infected paper cuts and scrapes? Is your feudal landlord demanding his monthly night of pleasure with your wife? No? Just "another day in paradise," you report, wryly, from ACTUAL PARADISE, which you deem a mixed bag at best because it doesn't present every facet of perfect perfection you’ve ever contemplated?
Right at this moment, we have all the power and freedom and comfort and security and peace and entertainment and self-determination and options, with none of the yawing maladies actually ruining anything. If we had a time machine and could choose anytime to live, we could not have done better. We took the cherry off the sundae. We grabbed the gold ring. We KILLED IT.
No one has punched me in years. I walk around with a plastic thingee in my heart keeping me impossibly alive and a device in my pocket offering all knowledge, entertainment, and communication, on demand. Drivers will literally pull over to allow a special medical truck to rush me to hospital as the top civic priority, like I was Julius Freaking Caesar. Actuality is tremendous, which explains why we're compulsively drawn to dramatically dire thinking, simply to ballast the extreme excess of perfectly appropriate happiness!
So just suck up the awesomeness…if you can do so amid 300 million people insisting everything sucks! They are entitled, blinkered, over-privileged aristocrats all, especially the ones most stridently claiming victimhood. But don't let them harsh your buzz. Rather, soothe them like the adorable, innocent babies they are...or at least engage your intention to do so. Simply frame them thus. You'll feel better, and they'll feel better-seen. They're just a bit burpy, that’s all.
"But wait;" you might ask, "aren't you really saying it's all downhill from here?"
That's awfully dramatic. Potential loss of snidely unappreciated privilege has always been the aristocrat’s anxiety. I hate hate hate my position, but will squeal like a cut pig if they try to take it away.
Look, if you can’t muster gratitude for the Right Now of it all, bucking enormous odds to live during this brief window of Peak Humanity, and can only focus on its (forecasted potential) loss - richly ironic despair given that, just five minutes ago, you imagined you were already languishing in Hell - then you don’t deserve Peak Humanity.
What's more, you'd have ditzily and needlessly pushed the eject button, framing yourself out of Heaven (What IS) and into Hell (a not-here/not-now mental story you've made yourself believe), just as I foolishly did one Christmas Eve many years ago. An entitled demand for Perfect Forever Perfection makes you the aristocrat; the leading edge; the very cause of the downfall, both internally and externally. So why not opt out of such foolishness? C'mon, it's Christmas!!!
I've described Actuality. I realize your peer groups sharply disagree, and you yourself feel vexed by a plethora of petty mattress peas while striving for seamlessly serene repose. But we all are the very luckiest of our entire funnel of ancestors, back to the first proto-mammal venturing out of the ocean barely imagining lasagna or fleece-lined sweatpants!
And with that, I wish you, very heartfully, a very Merry Christmas!
Bucking the Decline of Twitter and Surviving the End of Western Civilization
A friend asked how I'm finding the experience on Twitter as it notoriously declines. I told him that I stay in the fishbowl of my self-curated "Must-Read" list (curated to merge "centrists, moderate Dems, and anti-Trump Reps + smart nonpartisans"), so for me it's as good as ever.
It helps, too, that I once spent an hour blocking 200 ad accounts, and now need to block 15 or so new accounts per day to disappear all ads (which is why Musk's toying with removing the "block" function). So I almost never view raw Twitter, and am completely removed from the stuff that upsets so many people.
Here's our conversation about this, lightly edited to simulate coherence at 5a.m.:
It will be like the decadence of late Rome, but with all the fevered frizzy insanity cranked up to "11". As I once wrote:
I wrote last year about deciding when to pick up and split. Like many/most/all Jews, I've got a strong visceral drive to avoid the complacency of German Jews circa 1933. Having divined the end game (it doesn't require frickin' Nostradamus), I'm already gone.
But if you're youngish, or know someone youngish, here's some shrewd advice for pulling that trigger: when anything like Universal Basic Income becomes a reality, go to the Third World, where people will remain people for a while. Not for atmosphere, but for safety.
If you've been reading here for some time, you know I'm the opposite of an alarmist (I'm the only fervent anti-Trumper I know who rated him a "5.5" in 2019 - he's dropped some, of course, since then - and it certainly wasn't that I liked any damned thing about him). So you can take this prediction to the bank (hopefully to withdraw all your money and get the hell out of Dodge at the suggested moment).
"Universal Basic Income" is very much like Mars Colonization. It's a superficially fun and noble-sounding endeavor that could only be envisioned by people with no clue whatsoever about real live human beings. It's yet another in a long line of preposterous, ruinous Egghead Utopias (as coined in the most-read Slog posting, "How I Outgrew Libertarianism").
The positive flip-side of all this is very very very positive indeed: "We Are Enjoying Peak Humanity Right Now"
It helps, too, that I once spent an hour blocking 200 ad accounts, and now need to block 15 or so new accounts per day to disappear all ads (which is why Musk's toying with removing the "block" function). So I almost never view raw Twitter, and am completely removed from the stuff that upsets so many people.
Here's our conversation about this, lightly edited to simulate coherence at 5a.m.:
Me: Like Chowhound, it’s what you make of it. People are too passive with social media.
Imagine if Chowhound had a block feature. And the ability to curate user and topic lists
Friend: The problem is that it requires effort. With great rewards come great effort!
Me: People don’t do things.
Friend: Yeah. They also don’t plan even when they want to do something. I force every student to plan in the lab before they start experiments. It's not easy.
Me: The problem is that we're all Aristocrats. A peasant in 1598 would understand all our behavioral ills quite keenly. They knew what aristocrats were like. We lost that understanding as we became ones.
Friend: Yup. No need to do stuff for survival
Me: Pampered, self-important, and self sufficient. Everyone special
Friend: The complacent, passive ones tended to die young. So there was survivor bias
Me: But that’s the outer extreme. Even those with easier lives needed to really work to keep up. There were plenty of layers between paupers and aristocrats. Bourgeois, et al.
Friend: Yup
Me: We’re now one or two clicks away from Universal Basic Income, when people will be paid not to work. Be very, very glad you’ll be dead.
Friend: Heh
Me: Not joking in the slightest. It will be the end of us. The endgame of mega-addled aristocracy, where all bad things go asymptotic.
It will be like the decadence of late Rome, but with all the fevered frizzy insanity cranked up to "11". As I once wrote:
Scientists keep trying to explain the Fermi Paradox - the absence of evidence of advanced civilization in the Universe. What is the X Factor obliterating civilizations before they can build Dyson Spheres, capturing the totality of a star's energy, or find a way to communicate over the void with brutes like us?
Comfort and wealth, baby. That's the perilous X Factor. Comfort and wealth.
I wrote last year about deciding when to pick up and split. Like many/most/all Jews, I've got a strong visceral drive to avoid the complacency of German Jews circa 1933. Having divined the end game (it doesn't require frickin' Nostradamus), I'm already gone.
But if you're youngish, or know someone youngish, here's some shrewd advice for pulling that trigger: when anything like Universal Basic Income becomes a reality, go to the Third World, where people will remain people for a while. Not for atmosphere, but for safety.
If you've been reading here for some time, you know I'm the opposite of an alarmist (I'm the only fervent anti-Trumper I know who rated him a "5.5" in 2019 - he's dropped some, of course, since then - and it certainly wasn't that I liked any damned thing about him). So you can take this prediction to the bank (hopefully to withdraw all your money and get the hell out of Dodge at the suggested moment).
"Universal Basic Income" is very much like Mars Colonization. It's a superficially fun and noble-sounding endeavor that could only be envisioned by people with no clue whatsoever about real live human beings. It's yet another in a long line of preposterous, ruinous Egghead Utopias (as coined in the most-read Slog posting, "How I Outgrew Libertarianism").
The positive flip-side of all this is very very very positive indeed: "We Are Enjoying Peak Humanity Right Now"
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Ordinariness Follow-Up
Followup to yesterday's posting on Ordinariness...
Friend: One comment about your latest slog. I think we hate to hear our own voices because they sound physically different resonating inside our heads than they do to someone else across the room, or as recorded on a device.
Me: True, of course, but my point is that no voice would satisfy.
Friend: But I don’t wanna sound like a nasally white guy
Me: Whatever you wanna sound like is unachievable by a mere human. We can pick apart indivdual aspects, but any presented voice would be picked to death. No perfection is nearly perfect enough to make us say “that’s me!”
Ordinariness
Here's why we hate to hear our voices played back to us, or to unexpectedly glimpse ourselves in reflection:
It's not some complicated dysmorphia. It's not that we expected some other specific thing. It's that narcissists cannot tolerate the prospect that they're just some fucking person. That "I'm just one of them."
This worst of all possible scenarios fills us with horror and revulsion, explaining the horror and revulsion.
Same when we're confronting evidence of our failure, faults, and inadequacies. It's not the shortfall, itself, that galls. It's the recognition not of a blemished record, but of ourselves as someone even susceptible to blemish. We recoil from mountainous evidence, though doing so dooms us to mediocrity (or worse).
Why do humans so famously hate change, even though we perpetually despise our current status quo? Change might reveal our current position as something other than "end-all and be-all". And we'd much rather feel complete than strive for completion - which would require change!
We scarcely hesitate, however, to externally project that skew, indignantly demanding that the world (which is exactly to our specifications) shape up.
It's not some complicated dysmorphia. It's not that we expected some other specific thing. It's that narcissists cannot tolerate the prospect that they're just some fucking person. That "I'm just one of them."
This worst of all possible scenarios fills us with horror and revulsion, explaining the horror and revulsion.
Same when we're confronting evidence of our failure, faults, and inadequacies. It's not the shortfall, itself, that galls. It's the recognition not of a blemished record, but of ourselves as someone even susceptible to blemish. We recoil from mountainous evidence, though doing so dooms us to mediocrity (or worse).
Why do humans so famously hate change, even though we perpetually despise our current status quo? Change might reveal our current position as something other than "end-all and be-all". And we'd much rather feel complete than strive for completion - which would require change!
We scarcely hesitate, however, to externally project that skew, indignantly demanding that the world (which is exactly to our specifications) shape up.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
The Sub-Rosa
Believe it or not, I only post my most accessible thoughts here, muddled though they might play.
But for the second time, I will indulge myself by posting something completely unrelatable because it uniquely answers a very thorny and existential question plaguing and persecuting a certain rare type of person. The last time I posted one of these, I explained myself thus:
We have never been a profound society. For all capitalism's innumerable advantages and benefits, such a system fosters briskly superficial interface with one's world. In pursuit of more and more, we're perennially busy.
Until recently there was, at least, vague cognizance of unplumbed depths. They're out there! And once I finally win whichever game I've decided to occupy myself with playing, I might explore them! Maybe I'll buy a book on mindfulness meditation!
Even in medieval India - one of history's most spiritual societies - crowds were hardly flooding into ashrams and temples to live contemplative lives. Rather, people would ply careers, and then, in late middle age, perhaps "go sannyasin". It would not have seemed particularly strange to learn that the tobacco vendor from your corner kiosk had closed shop, peeled off all his clothes, and gone to go live naked in the woods.
My point is that, even back then, that side of things was approached only once one finally found the time. But right here and right now, a tipping point has been reached where most people aren't even vaguely aware of deeper territory. It's not something to delay paying attention to, or even to ignore. It's simply not there.
Which is not to say, of course, that we're content with the here-and-now. In fact, we're increasingly discontent, persecuted by myriad trifling shortfalls. Like all aristocrats ever, we're deranged princesses hysterically scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas. And it's reached a heightened point where we no longer entertain the notion that the problem might be with our own perspective; a skew of inner expectation rather than of worldly outcome.
Our desire for gratification, having been stoked into an entitlement, produces an unquenchable thirst for perfect outcomes. Lost in righteous indignation at remaining bits of suboptimality - failure of the universe to fully and perfectly accommodate every single wish - we are, like hungry golden retrievers, fixated on our feed bowls. Eye on the prize, we are brusquely disinterested in pondering how we came to seal ourselves into this ridiculous Skinner Box in the first place. Shut up with your speculative hooey, and explain why I'm not winning!
The Game has clarified into a sharp-pointed undertaking: climb the upper reaches of the curve of declining results toward the most perfect wealth and comfort (what I term "liberal materialism"), with the same valiant moral fervor previous generations applied to the battle for basic freedoms and entitlements. A fool's mission. Lemmings off a cliff, alas.
To review: our relationship with deeper and more profound issues has gone from "I may concern myself with all that once I've raised my family" to "I may concern myself with all that once my career is a raging success and I'm living in a huge house with a paid-down mortgage" to....airless, soundless vacuum. Blank nothingness. A neutral snow-blindedness where all that exists are one's thermometers monitoring the numerous parameters which must be optimal to feel even remotely alive for one goddamn moment.
Centi-millionaire, international celebrity, and sex-symbol Mick Jagger seeks satisfaction.
The alternative routes - more profound considerations and less self-destructive modalities - are entirely off-screen, except insofar as they've been reduced to comic book panels. A bearded sage mumbles confusing platitudes. Hot room yoga for a firmer butt. Namaste, asshole.
But in this arid late-stage landscape of howling self-victimization, piqued entitlement, hysterical stress, and ceaseless busyness in the most comfortable, safe, indulgent, and leisured society the world's seen since the demise of Eden, where nothing deeper exists even as a speculative possibility, how do people respond when they face a bona fide advanced yogi?
What's the reaction to someone coming from the other side of things - the off-screen side - with some wisdom, a palpably tectonic vibe, and acting from motives which (not being hard-wired to relentless self-serving) seem unfathomable? How do people receive the warm intensity of bhakti; the crackling electricity of truth, just on the mere human interaction level?
Easy one. Sex. It feels to them like sex. 100% sex. That's now the only Other Thing; the sole remaining sub rosa realm*. If it's not about The Game, then it's about that.
But for the second time, I will indulge myself by posting something completely unrelatable because it uniquely answers a very thorny and existential question plaguing and persecuting a certain rare type of person. The last time I posted one of these, I explained myself thus:
As I grow up, I feel more and more compelled to toss certain esoteric thoughts out there among the 180 quadrillion web pages in case they’re helpful someday - even if they’re of scant current interest.
In a lifetime of finding myself ahead of curves (that's a complaint, not a boast), I’ve noticed that once crowds catch up, my voice is rarely necessary - or even heard - amid the torrent. But in certain realms, where I'm extra ahead, there are chunks which might remain missing. So I’ll risk confusing and exasperating regular readers by occasionally posting such chunks for the possible (if unlikely) use of other people in another time. Which is to say: you may well want to skip this (if only because it’s long!).
We have never been a profound society. For all capitalism's innumerable advantages and benefits, such a system fosters briskly superficial interface with one's world. In pursuit of more and more, we're perennially busy.
Until recently there was, at least, vague cognizance of unplumbed depths. They're out there! And once I finally win whichever game I've decided to occupy myself with playing, I might explore them! Maybe I'll buy a book on mindfulness meditation!
Even in medieval India - one of history's most spiritual societies - crowds were hardly flooding into ashrams and temples to live contemplative lives. Rather, people would ply careers, and then, in late middle age, perhaps "go sannyasin". It would not have seemed particularly strange to learn that the tobacco vendor from your corner kiosk had closed shop, peeled off all his clothes, and gone to go live naked in the woods.
My point is that, even back then, that side of things was approached only once one finally found the time. But right here and right now, a tipping point has been reached where most people aren't even vaguely aware of deeper territory. It's not something to delay paying attention to, or even to ignore. It's simply not there.
Which is not to say, of course, that we're content with the here-and-now. In fact, we're increasingly discontent, persecuted by myriad trifling shortfalls. Like all aristocrats ever, we're deranged princesses hysterically scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas. And it's reached a heightened point where we no longer entertain the notion that the problem might be with our own perspective; a skew of inner expectation rather than of worldly outcome.
Our desire for gratification, having been stoked into an entitlement, produces an unquenchable thirst for perfect outcomes. Lost in righteous indignation at remaining bits of suboptimality - failure of the universe to fully and perfectly accommodate every single wish - we are, like hungry golden retrievers, fixated on our feed bowls. Eye on the prize, we are brusquely disinterested in pondering how we came to seal ourselves into this ridiculous Skinner Box in the first place. Shut up with your speculative hooey, and explain why I'm not winning!
The Game has clarified into a sharp-pointed undertaking: climb the upper reaches of the curve of declining results toward the most perfect wealth and comfort (what I term "liberal materialism"), with the same valiant moral fervor previous generations applied to the battle for basic freedoms and entitlements. A fool's mission. Lemmings off a cliff, alas.
To review: our relationship with deeper and more profound issues has gone from "I may concern myself with all that once I've raised my family" to "I may concern myself with all that once my career is a raging success and I'm living in a huge house with a paid-down mortgage" to....airless, soundless vacuum. Blank nothingness. A neutral snow-blindedness where all that exists are one's thermometers monitoring the numerous parameters which must be optimal to feel even remotely alive for one goddamn moment.
Centi-millionaire, international celebrity, and sex-symbol Mick Jagger seeks satisfaction.
The alternative routes - more profound considerations and less self-destructive modalities - are entirely off-screen, except insofar as they've been reduced to comic book panels. A bearded sage mumbles confusing platitudes. Hot room yoga for a firmer butt. Namaste, asshole.
But in this arid late-stage landscape of howling self-victimization, piqued entitlement, hysterical stress, and ceaseless busyness in the most comfortable, safe, indulgent, and leisured society the world's seen since the demise of Eden, where nothing deeper exists even as a speculative possibility, how do people respond when they face a bona fide advanced yogi?
What's the reaction to someone coming from the other side of things - the off-screen side - with some wisdom, a palpably tectonic vibe, and acting from motives which (not being hard-wired to relentless self-serving) seem unfathomable? How do people receive the warm intensity of bhakti; the crackling electricity of truth, just on the mere human interaction level?
Easy one. Sex. It feels to them like sex. 100% sex. That's now the only Other Thing; the sole remaining sub rosa realm*. If it's not about The Game, then it's about that.
* - Outside mental illness, anyway. The paranoid, unspurprisingly, will find you threatening; control freaks will feel you're angling to control them; depressives will find you depressing, and the anxious will grow anxious. Etc., etc..So how does it actually play out? Well, if there's no mental illness on their end (and there often is), and if you check enough fuckability boxes, then it seems, to them, like a titillating invocation of sex. If not, that sexual invocation seems creepy and repellent (and patently not a function of anything going on on their end). Even if - especially if! - it has nothing to do with sex for you.
Friday, December 8, 2023
SIGA PS
Memo to whoever bought a million dollars worth of SIGA this morning (maybe just an odd coincidence), I'd urge you to sell whenever it bumps up. It's done so twice, and I held on both times, and, per the old expression, got slaughtered like a pig. Twice.
This will never be a Pfizer. Never an established company with brisk and enduring business. It's an incredibly narrow play, and it will continue to happen - insofar as anything happens - in fits and starts, i.e. "events". And it looks like the First World is way more complacent about the danger of weaponized smallpox than expected (a mere handful of countries stockpiles the drug, TPOXX, despite its socko properties), and while there's every reason to think monkey and other animal poxes are cured by TPOXX, this starcrossed company can't ever seem to get anything done, e.g. testing on monkeypox effectiveness (delays of which are evidently driving the CDC as crazy as they're driving me).
I do suspect there will be at least one more hurrah....though perhaps not all the way up to $26 again. But, man, will this ever test your patience....
Update: Monkeypox now surging in Congo, too.
This will never be a Pfizer. Never an established company with brisk and enduring business. It's an incredibly narrow play, and it will continue to happen - insofar as anything happens - in fits and starts, i.e. "events". And it looks like the First World is way more complacent about the danger of weaponized smallpox than expected (a mere handful of countries stockpiles the drug, TPOXX, despite its socko properties), and while there's every reason to think monkey and other animal poxes are cured by TPOXX, this starcrossed company can't ever seem to get anything done, e.g. testing on monkeypox effectiveness (delays of which are evidently driving the CDC as crazy as they're driving me).
I do suspect there will be at least one more hurrah....though perhaps not all the way up to $26 again. But, man, will this ever test your patience....
Update: Monkeypox now surging in Congo, too.
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Investment Updates
When Covid hit, cruise ship stocks fell to pennies on the dollar. It was assumed by otherwise smart people that no one would ever get on a cruise ship again. Figuring this was hogwash, I bought a bunch of shares of the leading cruise company, Royal Caribbean, at $37/share. It's now up to $119, within easy reach of its pre-COVID high of $133.
I bear firmly in mind that I'm not out-smarting anyone. The moment one imagines oneself smarter than the geniuses will be recalled as the initiation point of one's inexorable ruin. I don't imagine for a second that I'm the only one who saw this play. I'm just one of the very few who played it.
Why? Because I'm not a professional money guy under insane pressure to show huge results each and every quarter. Nor am I a spastic day trader chasing home run returns this week. My superpower, for the nth time, is patience. When I bought in Spring, 2020, I had no idea when the snapback would occur, which meant parking my money for uncertain lengths of time, incurring opportunity costs. Very few people will do this. Only shitty small-timers. SSTs!
Unpressured, non-greedy, and not maniacally enthralled with my own savvy, I could mulishly let the investment simmer for a few years. And I did, scoring a 221% profit. That's less impressive given the 3.5 years of waiting, but it's more than good enough for a SST like me.
I'd let some of that investment ride, but I know nothing about cruise ships. It may reach $133 or even $1330, but I would not be plying my patience advantage, and raw ignorant hope is no investment strategy. So I'll sell here.
In other investment news...
Monkeypox is on the ups again in Asia (here and here). The disease is survivable, but it's an ugly affair that can leave you scarred. SIGA has made frustratingly little advancement in positioning its indisputably safe and effective smallpox drug for treatment, though doctors in the know have full faith in it. Here is the CDC nearly breaking decorum to wink, nod, and strain to convince practitioners to use SIGA's drug for monkeypox despite its sorrowful lack of approvals.
I recently predicted that Apple would obviously go to $200. Almost there! But if you bought this year, I'd urge holding for the long term gain (i.e. lower tax bill)....even if it means waiting for the cycle to repeat itself. Apple never fails to take random silly dives, but it also never fails to recover and shoot beyond before the next random silly dive.
I bear firmly in mind that I'm not out-smarting anyone. The moment one imagines oneself smarter than the geniuses will be recalled as the initiation point of one's inexorable ruin. I don't imagine for a second that I'm the only one who saw this play. I'm just one of the very few who played it.
Why? Because I'm not a professional money guy under insane pressure to show huge results each and every quarter. Nor am I a spastic day trader chasing home run returns this week. My superpower, for the nth time, is patience. When I bought in Spring, 2020, I had no idea when the snapback would occur, which meant parking my money for uncertain lengths of time, incurring opportunity costs. Very few people will do this. Only shitty small-timers. SSTs!
Unpressured, non-greedy, and not maniacally enthralled with my own savvy, I could mulishly let the investment simmer for a few years. And I did, scoring a 221% profit. That's less impressive given the 3.5 years of waiting, but it's more than good enough for a SST like me.
I'd let some of that investment ride, but I know nothing about cruise ships. It may reach $133 or even $1330, but I would not be plying my patience advantage, and raw ignorant hope is no investment strategy. So I'll sell here.
In other investment news...
Monkeypox is on the ups again in Asia (here and here). The disease is survivable, but it's an ugly affair that can leave you scarred. SIGA has made frustratingly little advancement in positioning its indisputably safe and effective smallpox drug for treatment, though doctors in the know have full faith in it. Here is the CDC nearly breaking decorum to wink, nod, and strain to convince practitioners to use SIGA's drug for monkeypox despite its sorrowful lack of approvals.
I recently predicted that Apple would obviously go to $200. Almost there! But if you bought this year, I'd urge holding for the long term gain (i.e. lower tax bill)....even if it means waiting for the cycle to repeat itself. Apple never fails to take random silly dives, but it also never fails to recover and shoot beyond before the next random silly dive.
Tectonic Triviality
"Nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
Edmund Burke 1729-1797
I once wrote that “There are no trivial tasks. Your every action - every word, every gesture - shapes the future. You are the god-like prime mover of all that comes after. You are the Ancestor. You create posterity's ripples.”
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Bread Agony and Ecstacy
Aw, geez. Mere days after I complained about my favorite rolls being baked so sloppily that raw flour sometimes spills out, I got a bag of them like this. So gross.
Monday, December 4, 2023
The Old Country
Every American within a couple generations of their imigrant ancestor has experienced this, regardless of ethnicity: Conversation turns to the family's homeland, and grandma rolls her eyes and dismissively waves her hand, tartly exclaiming, with vast exasperation, "the old country!"
This is a conversation stopper, not starter, which makes it tantalizingly unsatisfactory for the rest of us. But, to her, no further explanation is necessary. Either you know or you don't know, and she knows, and one person knowing is quite enough. Enjoy the land of opportunity, and...better you shouldn't know.
Whether you're Belgian or Australian; Jewish or Egyptian, if your family's been in America less than a century, you'll have witnessed this scene. And, weirdly, the phrasing is always the same. There are so many ways to express it, but all Americans of a certain age use this precise term: "The Old Country!" Also the hand wave and eye roll. It's more American than eagle pie.
So then you go live in Europe for a year, and something peculiar happens. It gradually dawns on you what grandma meant.
That last paragraph was the natural place to end this slippery posting, but you'll surely want examples. What, exactly do I mean?
Alas, I'm as tongue-tied as your grandma. Either you know or you don't. All I can do is to roll my eyes and wave my hand (though with an affectionate grin which never arose on any American grandparent's face, because, unlike them, I have mere months invested in this experience) and exclaim "The Old Country!"
Ok, ok, how about this: if you don't get lunch at the exact same time as everyone else, you'll either starve or be forced to resort to Burger King. No slices or falafel or egg/bacon/cheese on a roll; that stuff's all garbage here. You sit down at the appointed hour and take an expansive hour to attentively dine, exchanging templated pleasantries with your career waiter, or else eat like a rat.
But that's just one thing. And grandma didn't build you a list because she knew that any handful of things would have made you focus on those specific things...when she was really referring to the entire weighty bundle of things.
I'll always retain my affectionate grin, though, because I knew what I was getting into. The liberties, looseness, and lightness of America, of which I was keenly cognizant, stopped seeming persuasively worth it. At this juncture in American life, The Old Country, despite its institutionally heavy, creaky thrombosis, feels more salubrious.
One exception: you don't hear African-American grandparents performing this rite, though more likely due to the wider generational distance than the barbaric conditions of their "immigration". I do know one recent African immigrant, however, who refuses to eat traditional African food with her fingers. Her eyes roll and her hand waves. The old country!
To me, she couldn't be more Jewish if she were bobbing her torso over an altar and droning in Hebrew.
This is a conversation stopper, not starter, which makes it tantalizingly unsatisfactory for the rest of us. But, to her, no further explanation is necessary. Either you know or you don't know, and she knows, and one person knowing is quite enough. Enjoy the land of opportunity, and...better you shouldn't know.
Whether you're Belgian or Australian; Jewish or Egyptian, if your family's been in America less than a century, you'll have witnessed this scene. And, weirdly, the phrasing is always the same. There are so many ways to express it, but all Americans of a certain age use this precise term: "The Old Country!" Also the hand wave and eye roll. It's more American than eagle pie.
So then you go live in Europe for a year, and something peculiar happens. It gradually dawns on you what grandma meant.
That last paragraph was the natural place to end this slippery posting, but you'll surely want examples. What, exactly do I mean?
Alas, I'm as tongue-tied as your grandma. Either you know or you don't. All I can do is to roll my eyes and wave my hand (though with an affectionate grin which never arose on any American grandparent's face, because, unlike them, I have mere months invested in this experience) and exclaim "The Old Country!"
Ok, ok, how about this: if you don't get lunch at the exact same time as everyone else, you'll either starve or be forced to resort to Burger King. No slices or falafel or egg/bacon/cheese on a roll; that stuff's all garbage here. You sit down at the appointed hour and take an expansive hour to attentively dine, exchanging templated pleasantries with your career waiter, or else eat like a rat.
But that's just one thing. And grandma didn't build you a list because she knew that any handful of things would have made you focus on those specific things...when she was really referring to the entire weighty bundle of things.
I'll always retain my affectionate grin, though, because I knew what I was getting into. The liberties, looseness, and lightness of America, of which I was keenly cognizant, stopped seeming persuasively worth it. At this juncture in American life, The Old Country, despite its institutionally heavy, creaky thrombosis, feels more salubrious.
One exception: you don't hear African-American grandparents performing this rite, though more likely due to the wider generational distance than the barbaric conditions of their "immigration". I do know one recent African immigrant, however, who refuses to eat traditional African food with her fingers. Her eyes roll and her hand waves. The old country!
To me, she couldn't be more Jewish if she were bobbing her torso over an altar and droning in Hebrew.
Sunday, December 3, 2023
London Aspirational Chow
So I've spent the last some odd months in a Portuguese fishing village with spectacular food. But it's all 100% grandma. No trained chefs. No flair, no touch, no training, no meticulousness. Just unrefined soul. That would be fine with you? Well, try eating that for the better part of a year without respite and see if you don't crave something more meticulous.
Here's an example of the problem. I'd never previously spotted what American restaurants term "Portuguese rolls" until I came across this pão d'avó from an obscure bakery on the grimmer side of town.
I've been slicing/toasting them to make panini, egg sandwiches, etc, and they're SO spongey and SO crispy - and, being naturally fermented, incorporate SO much English muffin tang - that I crave them like dope. But about every tenth roll I cut, a tiny trace of raw flour comes spilling out. This is not cool. Trained bakers would boggle at this amateurish error. But how can you not forgive it when the result's this stellar?
I grabbed a discount plane ticket to London, where I deliriously sopped up all the non-peasant chow I could find. Less soul, more composure. Starch in the collars and nothing to forgive.
I hit Kish restaurant for Iranian. Everyone knows tahdig, the crusty Persian rice, but this is its classy cousin, called tahchin: crusty rice cake filled with shredded chicken, yogurt, egg and saffron (so much real saffron!), pistachios, and barberries.
Then to Pique-Nique for a very proper French pheasant pithivier:
Do I know how to antidote or what?
Thanks to chowhound superstar Limster for the guidance!
Here's an example of the problem. I'd never previously spotted what American restaurants term "Portuguese rolls" until I came across this pão d'avó from an obscure bakery on the grimmer side of town.
I grabbed a discount plane ticket to London, where I deliriously sopped up all the non-peasant chow I could find. Less soul, more composure. Starch in the collars and nothing to forgive.
I hit Kish restaurant for Iranian. Everyone knows tahdig, the crusty Persian rice, but this is its classy cousin, called tahchin: crusty rice cake filled with shredded chicken, yogurt, egg and saffron (so much real saffron!), pistachios, and barberries.
Then to Pique-Nique for a very proper French pheasant pithivier:
Thanks to chowhound superstar Limster for the guidance!
A City on Mars
A new book, "A City on Mars” is getting a lot of attention, describing the less-considered downside of colonizing other planets.
I debunked living on Mars last year with my posting "Mars Sucks". And while it's hard to tell for sure from reviews, it doesn't seem like the authors have keyed in on the fundamental human comfort issues I noted.
But, regardless, it's good that humanity is starting to view this from a more realistic viewpoint than the cartoonish Buck Rogers SPACE EXPLORATION take. That's fine for highly trained astronauts for a limited amount of time, but you can't possibly support such a colony unless conditions on Earth are so unbearable that we're willing to grimly torture ourselves to survive as a species.
How do we fail to register the obvious here? It's a framing issue. We are so used to visualizing Mars as "cool" that we don't see how that's completely a head fake. We don't live in a cartoon - in an overarching dramatic arc. We live in our bodies, in an immediate place. Under certain circumstances, we can, via obsessive self-hypnosis, persist in peeering up at ourselves on an internal movie screen, basking in the "meaning" and the "glory" of our trajectory - i.e. inhabit the head fake. But that's for comfortable wealthy people (everyone in America is wealthy), and there would not be a nano-second of comfort on Mars or the Moon, ever. EVER! And there's nothing like egregious discomfort to bring one's framing back down to...well, back down to the relevant planetary body!
I debunked living on Mars last year with my posting "Mars Sucks". And while it's hard to tell for sure from reviews, it doesn't seem like the authors have keyed in on the fundamental human comfort issues I noted.
But, regardless, it's good that humanity is starting to view this from a more realistic viewpoint than the cartoonish Buck Rogers SPACE EXPLORATION take. That's fine for highly trained astronauts for a limited amount of time, but you can't possibly support such a colony unless conditions on Earth are so unbearable that we're willing to grimly torture ourselves to survive as a species.
How do we fail to register the obvious here? It's a framing issue. We are so used to visualizing Mars as "cool" that we don't see how that's completely a head fake. We don't live in a cartoon - in an overarching dramatic arc. We live in our bodies, in an immediate place. Under certain circumstances, we can, via obsessive self-hypnosis, persist in peeering up at ourselves on an internal movie screen, basking in the "meaning" and the "glory" of our trajectory - i.e. inhabit the head fake. But that's for comfortable wealthy people (everyone in America is wealthy), and there would not be a nano-second of comfort on Mars or the Moon, ever. EVER! And there's nothing like egregious discomfort to bring one's framing back down to...well, back down to the relevant planetary body!
Saturday, December 2, 2023
Declining to Perform the Agonies of a Changed Mind
Whenever someone convinces me of something, they invariably keep pushing - keep arguing their point - long after I've declared agreement. It's the darndest thing. And I just figured out what's going on.
We're supposed to change our minds ponderously. Painfully. Slowly. With weight and sighs and emotions. A change of mind is such a rare event in human society that we expect it to involve heft and solemnity. We watch for a process akin to mourning, where a person struggles to let go of an old assumption and be reborn into some unimaginable new identity.
So we expect to see the signs of titanic inner struggle. Without that evidence, how would we know there was an actual change?
In one of my most-ignored postings (which is saying something!), I noted that it's phenomenally easy to teach a young child to arbitrarily adore red lights, arguing that there are gargantuan implications for our latent reframing faculty.
We're supposed to change our minds ponderously. Painfully. Slowly. With weight and sighs and emotions. A change of mind is such a rare event in human society that we expect it to involve heft and solemnity. We watch for a process akin to mourning, where a person struggles to let go of an old assumption and be reborn into some unimaginable new identity.
So we expect to see the signs of titanic inner struggle. Without that evidence, how would we know there was an actual change?
Answer: because I just told you! I told you I was convinced! You chose not to believe me because I failed to undergo the expected agonies. My face didn't contort, my eyes didn't dim and refocus, there was no gasping or groaning. I just accepted the change! I reframe and get on with it. And this seeming witchcraft is freely available to you, as well. The kabuki rituals which signal reframing are empty drama!If you simply change your mind, your veracity will be doubted. You appear to be lying; merely pretending to have accepted a change. Or patronizing. Anything but simply changing your perspective. Because reframing is presumed to be rare and difficult - though it's literally the easiest thing a human being can do.
In one of my most-ignored postings (which is saying something!), I noted that it's phenomenally easy to teach a young child to arbitrarily adore red lights, arguing that there are gargantuan implications for our latent reframing faculty.
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