Spirituality in 33 Words

Spirituality is the process of learning to recognize and identify with the immutable subjectivity you are, rather than with the ever-changing persona you've been pretending (merely for kicks, at first) to portray.


Further reading:
Spirituality in 333 Words
The Visualization Fallacy (and follow-ups)
The Evolution of a Perspective

All postings labeled "definitions"

More Than 4,645 Puerto Ricans Dead

Shortly after Hurricane Maria, I posted this dire prediction:

The day after the hurricane, when I learned that the majority of Puerto Ricans had NO DRINKING WATER, my face turned pale. I could not imagine a way that thousands wouldn't die.

I am not expert in such things; I just know human beings can't live without water. So I can't understand how our government - even our corrupt, fake one - failed to recognize the severity of this for over a week. A trombonist reacting to TV news should not be more clued in than FEMA, the White House, and our armed forces, with all their data and expertise, when it comes to matters of disaster aftermath.

I pray it's not actually that bad, and that the military, having finally arrived, will stabilize things and this will turn out to be a trauma and not an apocalypse. But, again: I know, even without special expertise, that human beings can't live nine days without drinking water.

When we finally see what happened, it may chill the world. I have a choking fear that it's been a killing field. If so, this, not the Russian collusion, will be Trump's downfall. Those football tweets may one day be recalled like Nero's fiddling amid Rome's burning - an epic display of failure and evil that will echo in shocked disgust for centuries.

Hopefully I'm wrong. I'm overreacting, and there've been dozens of deaths, not thousands, and Trump will be just an idiotic transient blot on history rather than a Nero. That would be fantastic. But something tells me we need to brace for impact when the full outcome (e.g. from rural sections) finally emerges.

I have to confess that I'd never considered this outcome: that thousands would indeed die (upwards of 5000), but that no one would care.

We are all complicit in the silence. Our president certainly can't make us not talk about this. For now, the thing to do is to donate (here is a slightly stale but excellent set of recommendations), preferably beyond your fiscal pain point. If you don't, then you oughtn't wag your head in angry exasperation.

I just donated to most of the groups on that list, plus this group, endorsed by Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, the mayor of San Juan.

"Cornered Rat" Report #23

Monday, May 28, 2018: The phrase "cornered rat" finds 108,000 Google search results, up 18% from last time's 91,600.


All "Cornered Rat" postings in reverse chronological order

Making Sense of Felix Sater's Restaurant Tip

Help. I've fallen down an Internet rabbit hole.

First, Erica Jong's daughter posted a photo from a weird dinner party at her mother's house, embracing none other than Felix frickin' Sater:

This led me to discover that Felix Sater actually has a Twitter account, where he's apparently angling to become a "hey, it's that guy!" guy.

I'm not sure it's really working for him, though. Witness this oddly calibrated reply:

If you don't know, Sater - the son of one of the nastiest and most brutal Russian Mob bosses - once served hard time for attacking someone in a bar with a broken margarita glass. Hahaha. Colorful.

Sater's recent shtick in the media has involved claiming to have been a super patriotic American for years, doing risky espionage work for our intelligence services. It's all completely confusing (given the election tampering thing and the mob thing), but likely well-explained by this guy:

So anyway I stumbled across this tweet from good ol' Felix mentioning a restaurant called Dorian's that I've never heard of:

Strangely, Yelp comes up mostly empty:

...unless Felix got the name wrong (e.g. "Dorrian's", or "Dorian Grey").

But pretty far down Yelp's search results is a place with the correct name, and a reviewer calls it "a great hang out spot after work. Great food and good service. Definitely would come here again".

But there's only that one review, and the venue's entry includes none of the usual Yelp info. Highly improbable for a place in midtown Manhattan! And that review intrigued me.

So I googled the phone number, and it gets just enough hits to make it not a hoax, but nowhere near enough for a legit place in Midtown.

One of those search results reveals the corporation's full name: "Dorian's Tijuana S A". Their business sector is "Management Services".

Yelp - and all the dodgy resources in that Google search - gives the address as 450 Fashion Ave. I vaguely recognize Fashion Ave as an alias for 7th Ave, but it's awfully strange to use that form, especially since that's the location of Nelson Tower which always uses the more normal address of 450 7th Avenue.

But what's super weird is that googling "Nelson Tower" together with "Dorian's" yields no useful results at all.

Anyone out there have any ideas?


UPDATE
Many Twitter users insist that he simply misspelled Dorrian's. But I still have no idea what's going on with Dorian's on "Fashion Ave" with the Tijuana connection.


UPDATE 2
Barry Strugatz describes this as the "Chowhound version of Coppola’s The Conversation."

Another Lebron Magical Moment of Inspiration

Another NBA conference final, another "how-did-LeBron-do-that?" moment (here was last year's).

Watch the very short video, below, a few times. The big question is: how did LeBron know the guy was coming from behind him?

But, even knowing, how did he manage to execute that pass, when, .001 seconds prior, he was set - even committed! - to shoot? Human beings startle for a moment when circumstances require a change of plan!

Growing Impoverished by Paying Workers, Themselves Impoverished

I have a decent understanding of basic economics, but my mind keeps circling this puzzle again and again, and I just can't make sense of it.

My elderly mother requires lots of care, so we pay a nice, smart Jamaican women (untrained, but bright, principled, and highly competent) to come in 6 days per week. The expense, of course, is killing us. And yet, this woman is very poor. She takes three buses to get to work (>1 hour commute) because she can't afford even a used car.

It irks me that she can be so diligent and smart and competent, and work so hard, and cost so much (from our perspective), and still be poor. But what really confuses me is that we're impoverishing ourselves with her wages...yet she's still poor. That makes no sense at all to me. There's no middleman. We pay her directly. Where, exactly, is the wealth going?

Of course, I can do the math, and spot the shortfall, but in a larger, macroeconomic sense, there's something wrong here, and I can't quite pin it down.


Two notes:

1. I actually do understand one facet of it. It's not that she's poor, it's that she's slightly less obscenely rich. Billions of humans (including her relatives back home in Jamaica) would guffaw at the notion that needing to take a bus to work amounts to poverty. I sound like Mrs. Howell grieving for the unfortunate slobs who can't dine on fine china or vacation in Monaco. But, still, this doesn't explain the lose/lose economic dynamic. How can both sides be making out so poorly?

2. My grandfather was perpetually aggrieved by inflation. "How can people, especially younger people, afford these crazy prices?" he'd cry back in the 80s. "Don't forget that wages increase with inflation, too!" I'd respond assuredly, the cocky American college student. Grandpa would wag his head bitterly, "no." I was missing the essential element. Maybe this is what I was missing?


Update: On three hundredth thought: It's probably useful to bear in mind that we're buying a luxury. Most people put elderly relatives in institutions or find a way to care for them themselves. My mailman and plumber earn good wages by providing essential services time-shared by large communities. One-to-one purchase of a (minor) luxury service is an odd economic proposition, made viable only by inexpensive immigrant labor. It's thus inherently ill-paying, yet high-priced, over time. This doesn't fully satisfy my curiosity, but I'm getting there.

"Cornered Rat" Report #22

Tuesday, May 15, 2018: The phrase "cornered rat" finds 91,600 Google search results, down 4% from last time's 95,700.


All "Cornered Rat" postings in reverse chronological order

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How to Kill a Tick

I just saw an elegant solution to the age old conundrum of how to kill a tick. Stick it to a piece of adhesive tape, then loop the tape back over the tick, so it's encased on both sides. It will eventually die, and meanwhile, you can hold on to it and show it to a doctor if you develop a target pattern on your skin.

Info on tick repellent.

Stock Update: Apple and SIGA

As previously discussed, I've been more or less living on Apple's stock swings for the past few years. My strategy is simple: buy low and sell high. I deem this safe, because I'm confident Apple will not be perma-crushed by some fritzy antenna or wobbly case. And I deem "high" and "low" to be relatively easy calls because the company's too big to be super volatile. There's only a macro-volatility, whereby it periodically dips 25% and then returns to a new high - over and over and over and over again. Even a plebe like me can profit from that.

As I wrote in that link, people go wrong by assuming "buy low and sell high" means "buy at the very bottom and sell at the very top." They do stupid greedy things in pursuit of this impossibility. The last time Apple's stock plummeted, I bought around $115, and it eventually sunk further still, to the 90s. Fine. I did not curse or wail. And, as the stock recovered, I sold most of my shares in the $160s, missing out there as well (it's currently in the mid $180s). It's ok. I'm not greedy. My non-greediness is an investment superpower. I revel in it.

I'll sell my remaining shares around $200, if the price seems to settle there. And next time the price dips by over 25%, I'll buy a ton more as soon as it seems to settle. Yah, "seems to settle" is a fallacy; any foothold in this realm is strictly imaginary. So I may miss top and bottom. But I sure won't miss "high" or "low".

I realize I'm betting against Warren Buffett, who's been buying at the high end of the price curve, in violation of his own value investing rule. But my thinking is different from Mr. Buffett's. He's apparently figured out that Apple is a very fine company with a solid future. I take that for granted. I bet on Apple's dips because I have the assurance that even when it's plunging like a stone, it's never existential. Most investors - with twitchy short-term objectives - hate to be caught holding a stock whose price is dropping. But I don't feel that fear, because I know that when short sellers and their minions periodically frighten investors, none of it can ever jeopardize the company's future, so I don't move with the herd. I wait. And since I don't like to pay taxes on short term capital gains, that patience only increases my profit.


Meanwhile, it looks like SIGA will get FDA approval this fall. That may open the gates to foreign orders. Or it might not. There's also another government contract around the corner, and this is the news that brought the stock back to the mid $6 range.

I see things very differently from most SIGA investors. They see a rich and prosperous future of US and international sales, corporate sales, alternative formulations and applications (e.g. animal poxes), and stock replenishment. I think they're missing what's really going on with this stock.

SIGA will never be a "real" company, with rich and diverse revenue streams. Rather, it's a three or four or five trick pony. The new US gov contract may well come to pass, and they may get a foreign contract or two at some point. Perhaps some other icing. But it won't be Pfizer. No ongoing, dependable brisk revenue, just long parched becalmings between unpredictable one-off outcomes. The stock chart will perennially alternate between lengthy drifts and momentary spikes, and unless you're tapped directly into the trading system with mega-twitchy algorithms, you'll never catch a peak. And this ain't Apple, so those who tenaciously hold on will miss out.

Hopefully FDA approval will come around the same time as the new US gov contract is awarded. That might create some actual exuberance for this stock, in which case the whole formula could change. But as of now, I plan to sell and run the moment this contract's awarded and the stock moves. Because the moment we put that award in our rear view mirror, SIGA is looking at yet another parched horizon, with nary a buck firmly in sight. And there's nothing the stock market hates more than no-hard-evidence-of-next-shiny-prospect.

#MeToo #BelieveWomen

I know several people with high positions in European governments. One is a particularly good friend. When he worked in New York for several few years, I spent a lot of time with him and his wife. Despite his powerful position, he didn't come from a high-class family. He'd earned his way up through the ranks via hard work and smarts.

His wife, born in the Third World, relished her social position. She'd taught herself to literally point her nose upward as a gesture of elevation. I was able to cut through all that; we were beer-drinking, pizza-scarfing, bike-riding, relax-and-hang-out backstage friends, so I rarely glimpsed her snooty, affected side. My friend, by contrast, was completely down to earth. Extremely nice guy; kind, gentle, thoughtful.

I had the chance to observe him in many contexts. I saw him angry. I saw him scared. I saw him fighting with his wife. But I never spotted a glimpse of anything frightening, or unkind, or unreasonable. Even in situations where it would have been safe and expedient for him to take advantage of his position, he'd never yield. If, as I once wrote, "Character is measured by the rate at which one discards one's values as stakes rise," he is a man of great character.

His wife, however, had a quick and savage temper and could be stubbornly unreasonable. Some time after he'd left New York for a new assignment, her unstable demeanor and ever-increasing affectation deteriorated the marriage, and he finally asked for a divorce. And she went nuts.

She attacked him in any way she could think of. She went to the local press with incredible tales of how he'd used his position to traffic drugs and run a prostitution ring. He'd beaten her savagely. He was a thug and a monster. It became an enormous scandal, and he was forced to return to his home country for investigation. She followed, filing a flurry of fantastical complaints with his government. Finally, after several years, it became patently obvious that she was completely off her rocker. Nothing added up. Not being particularly bright, her accusations were scattershot and unrealistic. In time, she came to be ignored, and my friend was able to resume his career.

Why had this happened? He'd been her meal ticket to a social position she really craved. Without him, there'd be no pretext for upward nose pointing. No fancy company and hors d'oeuvres. She'd always been unstable and driven by a furious temper, and now she had nowhere to go and nothing to lose. As happens sometimes, she eventually began to drink her own tainted lemonade. She started believing her own lies.

Over a decade later, she's still there, and still flailing away. At this point, all effort is directed toward the impending divorce settlement. Noticing a recent change in the political climate, she's smartened up and confined her claims to the domestic violence portion, which is harder to disprove. She is a battered woman, ignored and mocked by the patriarchy of her ex-husband's government. She is a cause.

And while the government at this point knows full well who and what she is, the country's independent judiciary is run by a #MeToo advocate who's staunchly taken her side against all these terrible men who've shown her no sympathy during her decade of brave, fruitless struggle. It appears that my friend will be taken for every dollar he has. His lawyer has shrugged and told him to expect the worst. There's simply nothing to be done.


If I claim you lit the fire that burned down my house, or that you kidnapped my child, I am not to be automatically believed. The intrinsic purpose of a justice system is to sort out accusations, in the presumption of innocence, because, as history and common sense have taught us, some accusations are true while others are false. If we could simply accept every accusation on its face, that would unclog our courts and spare police from investigation. Unfortunately, humans don't work like that. Ordinarily, intelligent, reasonable people would recognize this. Unless, that is, they're caught up in a mass hysteria.

Societal forces have historically inhibited women from speaking up about sexual harassment and violence, while protecting perpetrators. Quite evidently, we need to devise thoughtful ways to restore balance and justice in these matters. But the notion that we must simply #BelieveWomen is patently unreasonable. It's hard to imagine that modern, civilized people would advocate for such a thing.

Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?


My point here is, obviously, something that Must Not Be Said. If you're a reasonable Centrist like me, and reject extremism of any sort (even when - especially when - it stems from actual needfulness), and are weary of being told that you must not apply critical faculties to hot topics, you might want to have a look at this NY Times article on the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.