The Week in Review
Elon is Giving Away Money
Freakin' Elon, the Man: 6%
Before the birth of the Federal Reserve, you could just stuff your extra money in a mattress and let bouts of deflation increase your purchasing power or at least keep your purchasing power relatively stable, but no more: savings is a sucker's game.
Or at least was.
Elon has rolled out X Money: FDIC-insured checking accounts that pay 6%. That beats inflation. Well, probably beats inflation, assuming you don't use gas or eat meat.
So now maybe saving money makes sense again. Not speculating on Bitcoin, tech stocks, bullion, and that 1970 Roberto Clemente baseball card. Just saving.
Sure, Elon hasn't made it easy. You need to pay for that Blue Check, which costs $84 a year, then you need to have direct deposit set up from your paycheck, but hey, once you do those things, you get 6% on your money.
It's a "loss leader," though. Elon is subsidizing it. The rate will fall, but even then, it probably won't fall below the 4% rate that X Money is paying to folks who don't yet qualify for the 6%.
Flow is Counter-Conduct
The modern world is left-hemispheric, and the left hemisphere is a busybody piece of s* that keeps us in a state of anticipation and vigilance, always looking for something better and always wary that someone might f* with us.
It kills the power of attention and, as William James pointed out, that's pretty much the only thing we got in this vale of freakdom where death lurks, attacks loom, and sadistic homosexuals lust while you peacefully try to mow the lawn in your purple Speedo.
It also kills your energy All that freaking out, both the unnoticeable stuff and the Need-A-Quaalude stuff, is exhausting.
It also, paradoxically, hobbles your productivity: your LH is obsessed with productivity and its obsession cripples productivity. You can't focus while you're trying to do a project, and you're too tired from all the freaking out to take on more projects.
Educators have been trying to cripple students' attention for two decades now, and we have a legion of attention-deficit retards to show for it.
How are the educators doing it?
They're plugging the kids digital devices instead of books. Chromebooks (those orcs) were sprayed on our kids like the CIA throwing LSD at a parade in the 1960s. Andrew Contarutti lays it out in the previous issue of The Spectator. This description of one Retard-in-Training anecdotally captures everything I wrote above;
The original sin was the introduction of the Chromebook. I once watched a ninth grade student spend 45 minutes writing a single paragraph. The task wasn’t difficult. She was a capable writer. I knew she cared about the class and the assignment, but she was drafting on her school-issued Chromebook, the word processor only one of dozens of open tabs, each tempting – and ultimately succeeding – to steal her attention away from a half-written sentence. She’d type a few words, switch tabs, check the shared document her peers had converted into a makeshift group chat, respond with a joke, return to her essay, reread what she’d written, and start again. When the period ended, she looked exhausted, not from intellectual effort but from the constant labor of resisting distraction.
Mr. Cantarutti ends his mild screed with this quote from everyone's favorite Jewish-near-Catholic-convert, Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That's good stuff, but given that he's talking about academia--or the degradation thereof--I think he should've opted for this Weilism:
Flow: A Reminder
I'm Sorry if My Hi-Fi Stereo System is All F'ed Up and I Keep Repeating Myself
But County Highway is a remarkable publication. Volume 4, Issue 2 hit my mailbox last week. "Hippie Hell Week" by Miles Zaud caught my attention immediately:
The title and sub-title's promises didn't disappoint. It's the finest piece of writing since Volume 4, Issue 1, which is no back-handed compliment. The competition for "Best Piece in the Rag" is fierce every issue, and Mr. Zaud won it handily.
Mr. Zaud is apparently barely old enough to drink legally but he can crank the best prose this side of Hunter Thompson.
The young Zaud also appears to have the gonzo spirit: willing to hang in dark places and with dark people to get a dark but funny story. When he opened the piece with a recount of doing tick checks on a naked hippie, I thought I was reading Hunter and his exploits with the Hell's Angels.
Anyway, I gotta get this blog post in the cyber queue so I can't get into details now. You can read the Wikipedia entry about this large hippie network and annual gathering, though I recommend you click the link below and hope hard that CH is offering this essay as a freebie. Or bite the money bullet and buy a subscription, which will give you immediate access to this essay and the entire archive of amazing prose.
For now, I'll just close with more sub-titles for this great piece, but there were so many other contender sub-titles, like "Getting scrotum tangled in an underwater limb."
Miles Zaud