Two Discoveries in One: A Child Prodigy Guitarist and a Reincarnation of Prince
“An unbelievable guitarist,” AS said. “A must see/listen.”
AS didn’t leave a link, so I googled the name: Taj Farrant. And lots of videos popped up. Yes, he is amazing. And, in fact, he’s just a kid!
Here he is riffing on “Purple Rain” with Carlos Santana, and – in my admittedly amateurish opinion – he crushes.
Five Quick Bites
* Interesting. I’ve always wondered whether Yelp matters to the restaurants it reviews. I don’t use it, because I don’t want hundreds of people I don’t know and trust prejudicing my opinion about a meal I’m about to eat. But K does use it. Here’s a short history of its impact on the industry.
* Interesting. Am I being racist, sexist, and unfair when I say Kamala Harris is a certifiable dumbo? You decide. This guy, who I’ve been following for a while because he has a droll way of making his point, seems to agree with me.
* Fun and Interesting. A British linguist, Olie Ridge, found 11 distinctive accents spoken in and around NYC. Click here.
* Interesting. This inspirational video with Elon Musk will show you what hard work and commitment look like.
* Fun. Father-daughter swearing lesson. Click here.
“The 25 Most Beautiful Beaches in the World”
There is no such thing as “The World’s 10 Most Scenic Villages,” just as there is no such thing as “The World’s 15 Most Beautiful Men (or Women).” But that has never stopped me from clicking on such teasers – like this one from the Thrillist website.
The photo above shows one of the 25 beaches on Thrillist’s list – Anse Source d’Argent, located on a remote island in the Seychelles.
From LP re a common marketing idea that rarely works:
“I had the opportunity to read an essay in which you discussed how to earn extra money by taking surveys. Do you have it available?”
My Response: I don’t remember writing about that exactly, and neither does my editor, so I can’t link you to it. Perhaps it was a speech or a paragraph that was part of a larger essay that was filed under a different topic?
That said, I’m guessing you are referring to a direct-marketing strategy that has been used in the past and gotten fantastic results. But it’s not without risk. And it must be done correctly (from a copy perspective). But when it works, it can work very well.
What you do is publish in a periodical or send out to a list (email or snail mail) a questionnaire on a topic that relates to your product. The people that answer the questionnaire, regardless of their answers, are prime candidates for receiving a second, more direct advertisement.
It’s an expensive way to build a prospect list because it begins with a survey that asks for nothing but answers in return. But because it is not asking for dollars, you can sometimes get a very high response rate. And that can translate into a dollar return on the second effort that more than pays for the costs of the first.
AS re “Famous Last Words” – one of the “Quick Bites” in the July 30 issue:
“You left out two of my favorites: Johnny Carson’s ‘I’ll be back, right after this announcement’ and ‘I knew this was going to happen.’ (Don’t know who was responsible for that last one.)”
My Response: I should have remembered “I knew this was going to happen.” That could be the best of them all!
Sweet!
Click here to watch this surprise reunion between six-year-old best friends. (As you know, I’m a sucker for sentimental stuff like this.)
“An Appetite for Destruction” by Bill Bonner
One of the qualities I most admire about Bill Bonner, with whom I’ve worked for nearly 30 years now, is his courage as a writer. When you have a large fan base, hundreds of thousands of readers that pay you hundreds of millions of dollars a year to bring them news and views on macro-economics and investing, you get to know which of your opinions they like, and which they don’t.
Given the economics of the situation, and the natural tendency to want to have your essays praised and your thoughts affirmed, the temptation is to double down on the topics and perspectives that you know will be cherished and go easy on those that might be despised.
But if you want to think of yourself as an independent thinker and a writer with integrity, you must write about what your readers may be thinking about – even worrying about – and you must tell them exactly what you think.
Most of Bill’s vast audience of readers range from conservative to libertarian in their political, social, and economic viewpoints. Which means that there is always going to be a reasonably large percentage of his conservative readers that are going to be pro-military and pro-war.
I know from my own experience writing and speaking about the US’s long history of spending trillions of dollars and sacrificing thousands of lives to carry out proxy wars with the Russians, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan and now in the Ukraine, that wars are always complicated, with all sorts of questionable motivations on either side. But they are also always destructive. Even the most justifiable wars – where one side is invading and the other side is defending – quickly dissolve into chaos and hell that takes decades to recover from socially, politically, diplomatically, economically, and psychologically for all those who are caught in or march into the madness.
I remember when Bill wrote his first essay in response to the war that George W. Bush declared against Iraq after 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the thousands of lives lost felt, for most Americans, like a just cause. But I have always been skeptical of US involvement in wars since the Cold War began, and I was skeptical of that one too. Still, because everyone around me was so ardently bullish on the war, I felt a great pressure to mitigate what I said and wrote about it. Not Bill. He condemned it in the strongest terms from day one – and lost thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars in revenue because he had the temerity to do it so soon after the attack.
On July 23, in Bonner Private Research, Bill posted an essay titled “An Appetite for Destruction.” The first half of the essay was a complaint about the greed of the big manufacturers of war machines, the immorality of the politicians that promote war for political gain, and the American voters that keep supporting these never-ending wars with their tax dollars and their votes.
I’ll pick up in the middle of that essay here:
“The general level of dumbness is breathtaking. Americans think they can improve their economy by banning imports… cutting taxes and interest rates… and spending money they don’t have on things they don’t really need. Their national debt approaches the critical ‘meltdown’ level… and they just spend more. And neither Republicans nor Democrats even mention it.
“But it is on foreign affairs – and the relentless drive for confrontation – that the stupidity is most obvious… and most dangerous.
“It was surely no coincidence that the day Donald Trump was in the sights of a loopy 20-year-old from Butler, PA, the press delivered a bombshell report:
Secret Service ramped up security after intel of Iran plot to assassinate Trump
Secret Service learned of the increased threat from this threat stream,” [an] official told CNN.
“No evidence was presented. No motive proposed. Instead, the ‘news’ item merely reinforced the idea of a ‘threat stream’… that foreigners are behind it… and that the Iranians (whose annual military spending represents just 4 days of the Pentagon budget) are ‘bad guys’ who need to be kept under control.
“Secretary of State Blinken continues to beat the war drum: ‘Iran is one or two weeks away from reaching capacity of producing fissile material for Nuclear Weapons’ he claims.
“Blinken seems to have taken Colin Powell for his model. Twenty-one years ago, Powell had this to say:
We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more.
“In the years since Colin Powell lied to the world about Iraq, the US dug such a deep hole of debt it can no longer get out. The increase – $29 trillion – is almost exactly equal to the amount spent on the empire adventure.
“Between the two of them – war and debt – the US is stuck. It desperately needs to cut spending to avoid going bust… but you don’t count the pennies when you’re up against an ‘axis of evil!’
“Colonel Douglas Macgregor, talking to Tucker Carlson:
Over and over, we’ve been told that the Russians are evil… that their army is incompetent… that we’re winning the war. None of it was true.
“Among the most obvious untruths was that Vladimir Putin was a modern-day Hitler intent on conquering Europe. Putin explained the situation many times, urging a negotiated settlement that would guarantee Ukrainian independence and neutrality. American warmongers – notably Victoria Nuland, wife of arch neo-con Robert Kaplan – preferred war, betting on the superior power of NATO forces to defeat Putin.
“It didn’t work out that way. As many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died playing Ms. Nuland’s war game… and it now appears that Putin has won anyway.
“But nobody in US power circles seems much interested in the history of the Ukraine, its complex ethnic make-up, or the legitimate national interests of the Russians. No learning, no understanding, no historical perspective necessary. They just need fuel for their war machine.
“And now, China provides a useful enemy. Foreign policy hack Mary Kissel explained that China aims to ‘upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.’ They are ‘committed to destroy[ing] us.’
“Really? Is it the Chinese… the Russians… or the Iranians who will destroy us? Or, can we do the job ourselves?”