FTX and me. Reflections on sleep. Mitteilingsbedürfness revisited

20221203

Marc Cohodes, a figure from my distant past, has emerged as one of the first and strongest critics of the FTX fraud. Here are part one and part two of his interview with Alex Berenson, the guy who has been so right about Covid.  I appeared on Marc's Radio Wall Street program in the 1999-2000 timeframe. At the time I was a great proponent of speech recognition technology – exactly the same stuff I'm using to dictate this. Marc said that whatever merits the software had, the Lernout and Hauspie company was a fraud. They were cooking the books.

He was right, and he convinced me. He even led me to short the stock and make a little bit of my money back as it went down.  He mentions Lernout and Hauspie in this very insightful October interview, preceding the FTX collapse and the Berenson piece above.

I no longer invest in the stock market. I have been convinced that Facebook, Google, Tesla and other behemoths are mostly built on hot air. Perhaps true, but they have a lot of support from important sponsors like the United States government. It would be wrong to bet against them. In fact, obviously the smart thing to do would have been to bet with them.

Marc looks at crypto as a sham.  I’m not so sure.  If it does have a use, it will be in circumventing government controls of your financial life, such as central bank digital currencies.  I suspect that Bitcoin at least will somewhat serve that purpose.  Meanwhile, crypto will have to wait a while until the scammers are washed out of the system.

I wanted to send Marc an email congratulating him on his persistence. The email from 20 years ago no longer works, but he is on twitter. I had the dormant twitter account from 14 years ago when I worked briefly for Jewish News One here in Ukraine.

I was able to get as far as logging in, but then I get the screen to compose a message

The problem is that I cannot see a cursor anywhere showing me where to put the message. I am sure some of you know how to do it and I will appreciate your advice. It is obviously not critical. This is the kind of thing that my 11-year-old son should be ready and willing to help with, but I encourage him not to waste his time with stuff like Twitter.

In other news, Matt Taibbi, formerly of the Rolling Stone, has a wonderful piece out today on why we should not trust the mainstream media. They are very cleanly divided between liberal and conservative, each side having a listenership that is 95% going to agree with them whatever they say. The situation is not healthy for honest journalism.  Here’s his account of how he and Douglas Murray argued the point to the most lopsided victory in the history of the prestigious Munk debates in Canada.

This is why I endorse Substack. It is entirely supported by readers. I give money monthly to Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Robert Malone and others so they do not have to sell their souls, reporting what others will pay them to write.

The model works so far. As the twitter controversy concerning Elon Musk is showing, a great many people and governments are afraid of free speech. Apple and others are threatening to deprive Twitter of computer support. I can imagine the same will happen with Substack. I will enjoy it as long as I can, and I'm pleased that my subscriptions help the free speech cause.

The power was out from eight until noon and then again from three until seven.  We were pretty sure that that was it over for the day and sat down to play dominoes.  Bang at 7:20 it went out again. They used to have fairly predictable schedules. Not anymore. I don't know what the problems are. I'm sure that they have a lack of a lack of electricity altogether and that they want to turn it off periodically so they can work on the system.

It came on half an hour after the third outage. I was brave enough to turn on the washing machine (shortest cycle) and try to get the stink out of the T-shirt that I've used as a mop for two days, wiping up sweat after I exercise in the dark.

I posted my review of Why We Sleep yesterday. After doing so I had some afterthoughts, which I posted as comments that you may want to look at. They will appear in my Amazon review when it goes up.

I had some personal reflections on sleep. At 80 mine is not as good as it used to be. But inadvertently I have recently been doing many of the right things. First of all, since we don't have that much electricity, we have been going to bed early. Second, because the battery charge lasts longer if you turn the screen down, I have been using minimal brightness. It may not be good for my eyes but it is supposedly good for my sleep in that it minimizes the amount of blue light that I absorb in the evening, and therefore accustoms my body to the notion that night is coming.

Lastly, the house is cold. The average temperature in my room is 18°C, or about 65 Fahrenheit. It has fallen to 14, below 60.

I had pulled together a collection of snow pants, sweatshirts and so on keep myself warm. After reading the book I've decided that a single layer of longjohns will be enough. It's better that I sleep a little cold. Last night I put the theory to the test. It seemed to work.  From the book I get the notion that vivid dreams are a good sign of REM sleep, and I dreamt well last night.

Another thing we are doing well is letting the children sleep. The book recommends that they get 9 to 10 hours a night – pretty much as much as they want.  Sleeping late is equally important. Our kids don't get up until eight, later I am sure than the average kid in the United States. In fact, checking up I find that the school my grown children attended still starts at 7:35 in the morning, as does the school I attended in California sixty some years ago.  They had to get up about 6:00.

Our kids go to bed about 9:30 or 10. They don't have any trouble getting to sleep and they seem to be rested. The book says that sleep is key to learning, and they seem to be doing just fine on that in that regard.

A couple of years ago, before I was putting this blog on Substack, I wrote about Mitteilingsbedürfness – the compulsion to communicate. It's something common to all people. In children it manifests itself as the inability to keep secrets. If I buy Zoriana a sweet on the way home, she somehow must tell Mom even though she knows Mom will not be happy.

I feel the same compulsion. Today I wrote ex-wife Mary Ann, who has not answered any communication for 12 years now, telling her that the way our three grown children turned out might not be all our fault. I named two particulars. One is their early schedule. Also, they spent a lot of time with electronic devices –in those days it was mostly computers – but nevertheless had to get up early because of school.

Our son was diagnosed with ADHD, and the sleep book says that ADHD is a frequent misdiagnosis for simply not getting enough sleep. The solution was to stuff the kid full of amphetamines to keep him hopped up. The book contends that this messes with his sleep and his learning, which would seem to jibe with what we saw.  For what it’s worth, I wrote to the doctor who slung all the meds at Jack. Dr. Jay Giedd is easy to find on the Interenet. Even though my email approached him in a very friendly way, he enthusiastically ignored me.  He does not want to know how it all worked out.

I thought Mary Ann might be interested in the sleep story. The other thing I mentioned was vaccines. I’m pretty sure that's a nonstarter. Our three grown children were vaxxed to the max. While nobody could directly attribute their behavior to vaccine injury, coincidence or not they are a little bit weird.

I took the occasion to let her know that my young children are not vaccinated whatsoever, against Covid or anything else, and they seem to be doing just fine. None of us in the family have been diagnosed with Covid, though a couple may have had it.

She is bound to think that I'm living dangerously not to have had the vaccine, but the proof is in the pudding. We haven't had the disease, and certainly not any adverse events associated with vaccines.

I copied two of the neighborhood women who also had children. I have mentioned this neighborhood before – children were definitely the exception. These two women have four children, two girls who are quite successful, locatable on the Internet by their maiden names, with no indication of marriage, and two now grown boys, both a little bit weird. They all went through the same school system, vaccination regimes and everything else.

I don't know if my Mary Ann asked these women not to have anything to do with me or whether they chose to do so on their own. I rather suspect the latter – that they would intuitively know that Mary Ann would not want them to be in touch with me.

I write to them out of a little bit of that Mitteilingsbedürfness – urge to communicate – but with a little bit of an edge as well. I want to let them know that I'm doing just fine and subtly invite them to compare my life with theirs. None of them are going to have grandchildren.  This is the logical end point of the woke culture. They are simply dying out.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where as I wrote this the kids were asleep and the good looking woman was awaiting my finishing this piece and coming to bed.

Graham