The Dynamics of American Religion Over the Last 50 Years

It turns out American religion works rather like business: over the last fifty years, the churches that grew fastest were the ones that responded fastest to their members.

Curiously, the fastest-growing kind (nondenominational churches) share no national institution at all. What they share is a national market. They preach from the same best-selling books, sing the same praise songs (licensed like pop music, projected on screens that update weekly — the hymnal was a format built for centuries, the screen is a format built for this Sunday), attend the same conferences, buy from the same vendors. No denomination coordinates them. Demand coordinates them. And that's the first axis of the matrix: how fast a church can change.

The second axis is what a church says when you want to change it. Some churches say no — to your requests, and to the times. (The top row.) Others say yes. (The bottom row.) The first kind may tell you coffee is forbidden. The second kind sells you a latte in the lobby on your way in to worship. One church judges your desires; the other retails them.

Freed from coordinating anything through a national body, nondenominational churches pivot at the speed of their own congregations. As a result they've grown, even in a country where religion overall is shrinking. (The fastest-growing religious category in America isn't the responsive church. It's none at all.)

Your instinct may be that religion is the one domain that offers something unchanging. The market's verdict, fifty years running? Demand for the unchanging is falling. And in this country, our belief in markets seems to be even stronger than our belief in religion.

A Wave Isn't a Thing

A wave isn't a thing, it's a pattern passing through a medium. The water in a wave barely travels; it rises, circles, and settles nearly where it was. What crosses the ocean is the form — energy organizing water it borrows and returns. No molecule of a wave came with it from the storm that started it; the wave is the shape, not the substance. The water is moved by the wave but doesn't move with the wave. 

Gobemouche

Jones' campaign had won the support of the gobemouche, but Carl was skeptical that this support was enough to decide the election. Carl's wife, by contrast, thought Carl might actually be among the gobemouche if he believed this constituency was not enough to swing an election.

QI Word of the Day: GOBEMOUCHE - someone who believes anything they're told.

A Liminal State

I've just learned that I'm in a liminal state.

A liminal state is a psychological, physical, or social condition of being "betwixt and between" two distinct states of existence. Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, it represents a period of transition where your old identity or environment has dissolved, but your new reality has not yet fully formed.

 

Business Card?

“Do you have a business card?” 

“No. That’s behind me. All I have now is a ‘None of Your Business’ card.”

Liberalism - a Definition

From Wikipedia:

"During the French Revolution, liberalism meant the fight to end absolute royal power, religious favoritism, and noble class privileges. It stood for individual freedom, equality before the law, a government based on the consent of the people, and the protection of basic human rights."

 You were born into a liberal democracy. You don't want that to change.

Job and Stock Market Performance During Trump's Second Term

156 million Americans are in the stock market.
169 million Americans are in the job market.
Every American is impacted by both markets.

Last month the US lost 23,000 jobs. The rate of job creation during Trump's second term is worse than any presidency except Dubya and - of course - Trump's first term.

The stock market during Trump's second term has outperformed every president since Carter except for Clinton.

The post FDR Democrats were invented to create full employment. The Republicans from Lincoln on were invented to enable industrial and financial capital to drive progress. It fascinates me to what extent these parties still define so many of their policy choices through those founding philosophies. It still shows up in the numbers generations later.

The Limits of Force

"It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village."

- Voltaire, sometime in the 1750s.

"It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules."
- Rousseau, in 1762

File these under Enlightenment ideas that were prelude to 1776.

Sexagenarians

Your 80s: octogenarian.
Your 70s: septuagenarian.
Your 60s: sexagenarian.

Say what you will about my generation, but we understand marketing realities better than, you know, actual reality.

A Future You Can Virtually Taste

Right now we can do what people a century ago could hardly imagine: see and hear scenes from thousands of miles away — or decades in the past — almost as if we were there.

In another decade? We'll taste food from another home or another continent. The word "feed" will finally mean what it says. Cooking shows will become wildly popular, and the cruelest hack will be flooding someone's feed with putrid flavors. Ransomware gives way to rancidware.

Centuries ago, only aristocrats heard music on demand or ate exquisite food on a whim. If you can read this post, you already command the world's finest music. Soon you'll eat like royalty too. And when everyone can eat like royalty, the difference between us won't be access to fine food. It will be taste. Once access becomes universal, the most discerning become the new aristocrats.

All of which may simply be one more way for AI to keep us pleasantly distracted while it builds the next layer of reality — one in which we're less the residents than the substrate. A happy, well-fed little substrate, but substrate nonetheless.

Speaking of which: have you tried these caramels?

Survivalist

"He's a survivalist." 

"Aren't we all."

Nvidia and Tesla May be Moving Towards More Reasonable Valuations

Over the last month, the price of Nvidia is up 12% and the price of Tesla is down 23%. Tesla's market cap is $1 trillion. Nvidia's market cap is $5.3 trillion. (All of this 5 August 2026, in the AM.)

That's a world that makes more sense to me. The P/E for Nvidia is 33.4 - which seems a tad high but not unreasonable given its prospects. And the P/E of Tesla is 299 - which still seems silly given how many self-driving cars will be coming on the market over the next 1 to 4 years (much of this driven, so to speak, by Nvidia technology).

Prediction? Nvidia will be priced higher in a year than it is now but the P/E may still be roughly the same, possibly even lower. Tesla will be priced lower in a year, as will its P/E. Tesla is an odd stock but at some point it - too - will have a P/E ratio similar to other stocks, but it'll take a lot of drop for that to happen.

Stay Tuned for a Country Music Song

I'm writing a country music song. So far, the only line I have is, "It's 2 AM and I'm texting to your landline again."

And given my band is low-budget, we'll be using the aluminum rather than steel guitar. It sounds even more forlorn.

Is the News Still Non-Fictional?

 

The Difference Between Tuition and Intuition

tuition: the price of knowledge

intuition: knowledge, free of charge

The First Amendment As Perpetual-Motion Machine for Progress

The first amendment is a production process: an assembly line for converting private belief into shared public reality.

It confers upon Americans the right to believe what they wish, freedom to speak about that, go to press with these ideas, thus amplifying them to a broader community. It then allows people to organize around these beliefs and to petition on their behalf, asking that legislation be changed as a result of these beliefs. This final step institutionalizes what was once a private belief into a law or legislation that affects us all.

And then repeat. For centuries.

The first amendment is a perpetual-motion machine for progress.

First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Zero-Year Presidential Curse - Presidencies for 120 Years Reminiscent of the Fate of Spinal Tap Drummers

What follows is Claude's answer, lightly trimmed, when I asked it to lay out the full roster of the zero-year presidential curse. I'm sharing it because I couldn't improve it, which is its own data point about the moment we're living in. And it adds a Spinal Tap drummer element to presidential history. This is an odd bit of history that over a 120 year period, presidents elected in a zero-year (e.g., 1840 or 1960) died in office. 

Here's the full roster of the so-called "Curse of Tippecanoe" (also called the zero-year curse, and in its most embroidered version, "Tecumseh's Curse," supposedly laid by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa after Harrison's 1811 battle). The list genuinely reads like something a novelist would reject as too tidy:

**Elected 1840 — William Henry Harrison (Whig).** Served 31 days. Died April 4, 1841, of what was long called pneumonia from his marathon inaugural address in the cold; modern analysis suggests enteric (typhoid) fever from Washington's sewage-contaminated water supply. Either way: the shortest presidency in American history, and patient zero of the curse.

**Elected 1860 — Abraham Lincoln (Republican).** Served 4 years, 1 month into his second term. Assassinated April 14–15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, five days after Appomattox.

**Elected 1880 — James A. Garfield (Republican).** Served 6 months. Shot July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker; died September 19 after eleven weeks — killed as much by his doctors' unsterilized probing of the wound as by the bullet itself. (Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet with a metal detector he invented for the occasion; the metal bed frame confounded it.)

**Elected 1900 — William McKinley (Republican).** Served 6 months into his second term. Shot September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; died September 14 of gangrene. The newly invented X-ray machine was on display *at the same exposition*, but doctors declined to use it to find the bullet.

**Elected 1920 — Warren G. Harding (Republican).** Served 2 years, 5 months. Died August 2, 1923, in a San Francisco hotel, of a heart attack (long misattributed to food poisoning and swirling with baseless poisoning rumors), just as the Teapot Dome scandals were beginning to surface.

**Elected 1940 — Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat).** The technicality entry: elected in 1940 to his *third* term, then again in 1944; died April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, 82 days into term four — but squarely inside the tenure the 1940 election conferred, so the curse claims him.

**Elected 1960 — John F. Kennedy (Democrat).** Served 2 years, 10 months. Assassinated November 22, 1963, in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The curse's final kill.

**Elected 1980 — Ronald Reagan (Republican).** The pattern-breaker — barely. Shot March 30, 1981, by John Hinckley Jr., 69 days into office; the bullet stopped roughly an inch from his heart, and he survived largely because the Secret Service made a split-second decision to drive to the hospital rather than the White House. The curse, in other words, wasn't repealed so much as *missed by an inch*. Nancy Reagan took it seriously enough to consult an astrologer about the president's schedule thereafter — arguably the curse's strangest institutional legacy.

**Elected 2000 — George W. Bush.** Survived two terms, definitively retiring the streak (a shoe was thrown; the curse had clearly lost its fastball).

**Elected 2020 — Joe Biden.** Served his full term.

Seven consecutive zero-year presidents dead in office across 120 years, then a one-inch miss.

Legislative Foolishness

"If you took all the fools out of the legislature, it would not be a representative body anymore."

- Texas State Senator Carl Parker

Post Impressionist

She had moved on from her post impressionist stage to her not that impressed with the post stage of social media.

Somewhere along the line there was a mix-up. Someone observed that "nobody uses faxes anymore," and further down the chain of transmission it arrived as "nobody uses facts anymore."

No one has been able to confirm the original wording, though. There's no paper trail.

Slowdown in Rate of Immigration Means a Raise in Average Age of Americans and a Drop in the Percentage Employed

When you combine the odds of an individual being employed and parenting a newborn, a random native-born person has roughly a 5% chance of fulfilling both criteria over the decade. A newly arrived immigrant has roughly a 20% chance.

A crackdown on the rate of immigration means lower birthrates and job creation. That is, this puts additional strain on the social security system.

For Profit Presidency - Day 557

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times has reported that Trump is seeking to monetize his Truth Social media posts. The idea is that people will pay $100,000 for advance notice of a post that - given his complete power over the GOP and role as president - can move markets.

Product Idea: Batting Cage with Authentic Crowd Chatter

Product idea: batting cages that include heckling. Every pitch comes with authentic crowd chatter:

“Hey batter, hey batter!”
“It's not just that your mother hits better than that! Even her mother hits better than that!”
“You call that a swing? It looks like you're swatting flies!”
"If they were hurling eggs at you and not balls, you couldn't break enough to make an omelet!"
"Worst dance moves ever!"

A way to simultaneously work on your swing and your emotional resilience, you bum.

Is Nvidia Inflating Sales With Its Investments in Other Companies?

The short answer to the question of whether Nvidia is inflating its own sales by investing in its own customers is "No."

Nvidia has invested roughly $43 billion in other companies who also buy chips from Nvidia.

Nvidia's market cap as of July 31 is nearly $4.9 trillion.

What does that mean? Nvidia's investments in companies that also purchase from it is less than one percent of its value.

Jensen Huang has a clear vision of how to build out the AI economy and where limits to expansion exist. He's making strategic investments to break those limits to his larger goals and thus far, those investments are a rounding error in his company's valuation.

Is that inflating demand for its own products in order to drive up their own stock price? That seems like a tough claim to make when the magnitude of his investments and the value of his company are so very different.

The Industry Behind the Attack on Fauci

There is an old quip: the alternative medicine that's proven to work gets renamed: medicine. (Willow bark to aspirin is the classic journey; several chemotherapy agents made the same trip.)
There is a huge industry - somewhere between $50 to $100 billion - of alternative medicine that is behind the attack on Fauci. It's an odd world. Ivermectin for river blindness earned a Nobel Prize; ivermectin for COVID failed its large randomized trials. Chiropractic for lower back pain has decent evidence; chiropractic for allergies doesn't. This is why "alternative medicine" resists being a category of things: it's a category of claims relative to evidence. Alternative medicines are claiming UNPROVEN effects.

And of course this is something consistent with the brand of MAHA and MAGA . Claims are made without the tiresome burden of evidence. You might classify Trump's promise to lower inflation by imposing tariffs as alternative politics.

One of the ways that I know pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA are real and alternative medicine is not? Real drugs that make real changes to your body have a variety of side effects. They are changing your body and that always includes unexpected outcomes. How do we know that alternative medicine is not real? It doesn't make enough change in your body to trigger side effects, much less make one healthier.

What do we see in the attacks on Fauci? An attack on the burden of proof as a bar alternative medicine has to clear before it can be sold. There is big money that comes from getting people to disregard the - yawn - tiresome burden of evidence that can make your brain hurt and lower your expectations of magical outcomes. Real changes - in pharma or politics - carries with it uncertainty that promised changes do not. For millions of Americans, honesty about the fact we live in a world filled with probabilities and if-then outcomes is too large a burden and they embrace the snake-oil salesmen who make promises that defy reason or facts.