Where are the morons, now?

— Jesus of Nazareth, as quoted in the Gospel of Matthew

The latest smattering of dots all have plumes of smoke rising from them. But even through the fog of war, the picture is clearer than ever: Spend more. Make more enemies. See where that takes you.

The ancients knew where it led. Violence begets violence. And he who promotes it, eventually succumbs to it.

But wait. Is this still true in 2026? Is it investable?

Yes, dear reader (unless and until the kill-joy feds put a stop to it), two leading betting sites offer to help customers make a lot of money by, among other things, knowing where violence leadeth. Had they been around in the 1940s, for example, observers might have been able to bet on when Hitler would invade Russia, how long it would be before the German 6th Army surrendered in Stalingrad…or how many people would be killed in the firebombing of Dresden.

And as of a few days ago, speculators were placing bets on when the US would bomb Tehran…and whether the Supreme Leader would be taken out.

One of the two major betting sites, Polymarket, took in $529 million worth of wagers. And an analysis from Bubblemaps showed that six of the gamblers had made $1.2 million in profit. But wait. One bettor did much better than others. NPR:

Prediction market trader ‘Magamyman’ made $553,000 on death of Iran’s supreme leader

The trades drew scrutiny from members of Congress and critics of prediction markets, who say the platforms invite people with access to classified information to profit on lethal military operations.

Did someone just get lucky? Did he have ‘inside information?’ Does this go into the ‘corruption’ cluster? Or, did the gambler merely understand Trump’s historic mission: to bring the wrath of the gods down on the USA empire? After all, was there a better way to alienate 300 million Shiite muslims, and motivate them to mischief, than martyring their Supreme Leader?

The other major site, Kalshi, also had a ‘Khamenei out’ bet available, but when Khamenei got whacked, it took the high ground. Its chief announced that it had “rules to prevent people from profiting from death.”

The settlement with the bettors created some confusion and fuzziness. Betting on someone getting whacked may or may not be illegal. Kalshi refunded the money.

But the nice thing about the ‘prediction markets’ generally is that you are either right or you’re wrong. Until now, being right only gave you the pleasure of saying ‘I told you so.’ But now, if you can spot imbecilities, you can hoot and honk all the way to the bank. The Wall Street Journal:

The tax nerd who bet his life savings against DOGE

Alan Cole put his life savings, all $342,195.63, into a prediction-market wager…

Until Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency came roaring into the nation’s capital last year, he was largely a plain-vanilla investor or, as he puts it, a “normal, conventional Wall Street Journal-reading adult.”

[Then] Cole took the opposite position, one he didn’t see as a gamble at all. If federal spending in each quarter of 2025 exceeded federal spending in the fourth quarter of 2024, he would win big….

Just to be clear, this has nothing to do with ‘investing.’ This is pure gambling. And these are zero sum bets. If everyone thinks as you do, you can’t make any money. In order to make big money, a lot of people on the other side have to lose it. So, what you want to look for is a kind of mass delusion…and make sure you’re not part of it.

Tom Gara wrote on Threads: “He [Cole] knew that it’s basically mathematically impossible to reduce federal spending, but he also knew Elon fanboys are often morons.”

You can go to the Kalshi website and see that you could quadruple your money, for example, by betting that the federal government will officially acknowledge the existence of aliens before the end of this year. What are the odds? That there really are aliens? That the feds will say so? And that they will do so before the end of 2026? Well, when we looked, the odds were exactly 4.13-to-1. You put up a dollar. And if you’re right you get back $4.13.

Or, what are the odds that Spotify users will listen to Bad Bunny more than Bruno Mars at the end of this month? Well, bet on Bad Bunny, and if you’re right, you’ll multiply your money 93.5 times.

On and on…sports…popular culture…politics — you can bet on almost anything that can be precisely and unequivocally determined. That’s what was so attractive about Alan Cole’s bet. He was not gambling about whether or not DOGE was doing a good job…or whether it would actually cut some agencies and reduce some payrolls. The wager was direct and simple: either the feds would spend more or less than the year before. If they spent more, Cole would win.

Musk was almost unbelievably naïve. There are 169,000 federal employees in Washington DC alone…practically every one of them has made a career of getting the public’s money. A few pimply kids in Musk’s DOGE brigade weren’t going to make any difference. Besides, most of the spending was already locked in…and programmed to grow…thanks to Social Security and Medicare. And there was the Pentagon — the biggest single spender — to which Trump had promised more money. Under the circumstances reducing overall spending was not going to happen.

Of course, in these pages we predicted that DOGE would be a flop. Our logic was simple enough: if you can’t count on the feds to spend more and more money, what can you depend on?

And what can you depend on now? Where are the morons? What mass delusion causes bettors to believe Nvidia is worth $4 trillion…that the stock market is worth 230% of GDP…and that US debt can rise to $60 trillion by 2035 without triggering a major financial crisis?