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.

Seize the Memes of Production

This evening we took our two-year-old granddaughter to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, her first visit. At one point she said "meow" several times. I looked around for a porcelain cat. Nothing. That's when I realized she was saying "Mao."

I had not planned to explain communism this early, but the literature is clear: one must follow the child's questions wherever they lead. Still, when I heard myself say "Seize the memes of production," I concede I may have drifted from her core interests, which at that moment were noodles.

She's two. The material conditions can wait.

Fauci and RFK Jr.

Republicans hammering Fauci for recommending masks and vaccines during the most deadly virus of the last half century.  Meanwhile, they've made RFK Jr. health secretary. Kennedy, the guy who has reminisced about snorting cocaine off of toilet seats.

It is clear that Republicans are brilliant at getting attention. It's less clear what their values are .. besides, you know, getting attention. It's an administration driven by a quest for higher ratings - no matter what weirdness they need to engage in to do that.

Would You Rather Have Hundreds of Competitors—or Hundreds of Partners?

For nearly three years, I taught seminars for the Covey Leadership Center (Franklin Covey by the end of my time there). I loved the work, and my respect for Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has only grown over time.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, offers a powerful illustration of the progression Covey described from private victory to public victory.

The first three habits—Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, and Put First Things First—are about learning to lead yourself, about private victory. Public victory begins with Habit 4: Think Win-Win.

Huang has said that he doesn’t talk about taking market share. Instead, he talks with others about creating markets.

Think about the power of that distinction.

If your goal is to take market share, you may find yourself competing with dozens—or hundreds—of companies for a larger portion of something that already exists.

But when your goal is to create a market, many of those potential competitors can become partners. Instead of asking how to take business from one another, you can ask what new products, services and industries you all might create together. You are collaborating rather than competing. 

Imagine the difference between having dozens of competitors or having hundreds of partners.

Habit 4: Think win-win leads to Covey’s next two habits:

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

And then:

Habit 6: Synergize.

Synergy means jointly creating something that neither party could have created alone—a new solution that produces value for customers, employees, shareholders and partners in a way that did not exist before.

You can think win-lose and compete harder for a share of the existing market.

Or you can think win-win and ask: What could we create together that none of us could create alone?

Again, it is the difference between having dozens of competitors or hundreds of collaborators. 

Huang has helped build one of the most consequential companies of our time by pursuing that second path, working now to create not just a new market but a new economy, one powered by AI.

It might be worth thinking about.

Thinking win-win, that is.

Trump's Approval Rating and Other Strange Stats

Trump's approval rating is at its lowest to date and yet he still has the approval of one third of Americans.

Related, about 33% of Americans believe that extraterrestrials walk among us and that same portion of Americans think that they would outlast everyone else as a lone survivor of an apocalypse.

Which is to say, his approval rating may never go any lower.

Approval rating from the The Economist. Weird stats about aliens and the apocalypse from Reader's Digest.

An Echo-System

"What you have is an echo-system."

"-Wait! Did you say echo-system?"
"Yes."
"Do you mean ecosystem?"
"Have you noticed how a few messages get repeated again and again there?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Like an echo."
....
"Exactly."

Apple Once Again the World's Most Valuable Company

Apple — the one giant refusing to bet its balance sheet on AI infrastructure — is today once again the world's most valuable company.

Also of note: the three most valuable companies in the world sit within a 10 mile radius of each other - this on a earth with a circumference of nearly 25,000 miles.

Table from https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Bear, Bull, and Minotaur - How Little We Understand Markets

One of the many things that makes the stock market fascinating is that the exact same facts can reasonably support reasoning behind, say, P/E of 19 or 39 ... depending on a variety of other forces at play, some as curious as "mood."

Clothing and music go in and out of fashion and so, in a sense, do stocks or particular sectors of stocks or even the stock market itself.

If stock price were purely a function of variation in sales and profits there would be variability enough. But then you add to that animal spirits and the variability varies even more. The amount by which variability varies varies over time depending on various factors.

There are bull markets (stocks are up!) and bear markets (stocks are down!) and even that can be misleading.

"Is that a bull or a bear," asks the investor.
"Oh, Clive. That looks like a minotaur. No bull here, friend. You may have been taken in by a mythological creature."
"Mythological?"
"Well, not completely. The minotaur has built this maze of gains and losses that you're now navigating. The stock market is a labyrinth and you never quite know which way it'll turn next or whether you'll ever find your way out."

Attention and Institutional Design

Anxiety-and-boredom institutions versus skill-meets-challenge institutions is precisely the difference between attention strip-mined and attention cultivated.

The Rapid Emergence of National AIs

The president of South Korea was recently in San Francisco and shook hands with Nvidia's Jensen Huang over an agreement to develop a large language model for South Korea, something they are simply calling Korea AI.

[photo from The Korea Herald https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10819850 ]

This is a fascinating development that you may have missed.

250 years ago, hundreds of governments were creating constitutions. This was a new kind of technology that answered the question, If we are not our sovereign's country - if we are not simply Catherine the Great - Queen of Russia's - domain but are instead a nation that is defined as something that transcends a monarch - what are we? A constitution is an attempt to answer that question.

And of course constitutions evolve over time - most clearly with amendments but more subtly with hundreds of court rulings, laws, and emergent norms. But Korea AI represents something new: an emergent tool that has the capacity to synthesize polls, precedents, budgets, scientific and research discoveries, the evolution of culture and so much more into something we might call Korean.
This is not unique to Korea. How many countries are engaged in creating their own national AI?

If the bar is "formal national commitment to AI sovereignty," the figure is startling: at the AI for Developing Countries Forum in Bangkok in February 2026, delegates from over 100 countries adopted a declaration to pursue AI sovereignty — control over AI data, computing resources, and the models operating within their borders — explicitly so that models reflect each nation's "languages, cultures, and values." If the bar is "actually building or funding a national model," the realistic count is somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 countries with concrete programs, and it's now a budget line in most of the G20 — a stated strategic priority of essentially every government with the fiscal capacity to fund one.

Korea's announcement, in other words, isn't an outlier — it's one of the last major economies to formalize what has become, in about thirty months, a near-universal ambition.

In a sense, this is an attempt to formalize a national culture: its mix of capabilities and knowledge and its values and goals.
An American AI suggests the possibility of synthesizing culture into laws and budgets. The cultural debates about what we mean by British or German or even European give way to an elaborate scorecard that has the potential to synthesize debates from talk shows, public opinion, research from universities and - of course - legislation debated and passed into laws and budgets. The emergent property of a nation can become intellectual engine to an American AI or Colombian AI.

Among the many questions this raises is simply this: is this more or less democratic? A consciousness that emerges out of the various sometimes harmonious sometimes clashing impulses, thoughts and goals in the same way that a sense of self emerges out of target weight and the allure of chocolate, goals and priorities expressed versus goals and priorities lived, etc. Is this sense of Korea AI or America AI something transcendent of the old media and legislature or does it represent something too opaque to qualify as democratic?

This Blog Author's Philosophy in a Sentence

Progress is the transformation of “there is only so much” into “there is so much”- by enabling people, ideas, and institutions to combine in ways that create possibilities none could create alone.

Elon Musk's Cultural Dissonance Regarding Religion and AI - His Interview with the Economist

The Economist's Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed the world's richest man. So much could be said about it, but I'll limit myself to one observation about its beginning and its end.

At the start, Elon Musk calmly acknowledges that AI could mean an apocalyptic future for mankind — but says he's fairly confident the more probable outcome is that AI and robotics deliver unprecedented, widespread prosperity. Risk acknowledged, reward embraced.

At the end, he's defending his prediction that Britain — a place he admits he hasn't visited in years — is headed for civil war because it lets in people from other cultures, primarily Muslims, whose beliefs will create a rupture. Risk acknowledged, reward forgotten.

Notice the accounting. For his own disruptive creation, Musk holds danger and promise in the same hand and bets on promise. For the disruption of unfamiliar beliefs, he can no longer find the promise at all.

Which is odd, because the promise is the modern world's founding wager. The First Amendment may be the most brilliant social invention in history. (Yes, that's the US, not Britain — but Musk claims it as his creed; free speech absolutism was his stated reason for buying Twitter.) Put simply, it commits a nation to welcoming ideas that others find offensive — on the bet that the collision of beliefs produces more progress than protection from them ever could.

Musk is clear-eyed that welcoming AI means welcoming an intelligence that may reject us, oppose us, or synthesize with our own to create unprecedented progress. He seems unable to see that welcoming foreign religions, philosophies, and perspectives is the same wager — one that may applaud us, boo us, or synthesize with our own beliefs to create unprecedented progress. It's a wager the West has been winning for centuries.

In this sense, AI isn't a break from history. It's the newest entrant in a long series of disruptive arrivals — democracy, thousands of religions including atheism, philosophies, lifestyles, ideas — that collided to create the modern world.

The modern world is nothing if not a belief in the benefit of welcoming — of making ourselves vulnerable to — what is foreign, new, and possibly disruptive. The entanglement of risk and reward is something intrinsic to progress. 

https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/an-interview-with-elon-musk

Elon Drops from 4X Wealthier Than Second Richest Person to Just 3X

As of 24 July 2026 ... Elon Musk has lost as much as the second richest man in the world and still has roughly $750 billion.
He's dropped from more than one trillion dollars in net worth to $725 billion. Larry Page - cofounder of Google / Alphabet and second richest man in the world - is now worth $262 billion. Per Forbes.

data:
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#38ff1823d788